At the close of To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck, a priest stands at his door in a downpour with a crucifix in his hand. Outside, the people of the valley are celebrating the end of a drought by drumming on guitars, chanting, putting on animal skins they cannot explain, and rolling in the mud. He knows exactly what he is listening to. He steps out, stands in it, then goes back inside, shuts the door and hangs up his cloak.
That is the last page of To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck, and it is the most honest ending in his early work. The old religion is still there underneath, it has just been seen to work, and the official faith declines to pick a fight it would lose.
To a God Unknown Gives Four Brothers Four Theologies
The structure of To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck is schematic and worth laying out, because the novel is really an argument conducted between siblings.
Joseph Wayne leaves the family farm in Vermont because the land there cannot support them all, takes up homestead ground in a Californian valley, and summons the rest. When his father dies back east, Joseph becomes convinced the old man’s spirit has entered a great oak beside the new house. He begins talking to it, then leaving offerings.
Thomas is wordless and comfortable only with animals, and never once asks what his brother is doing. Benjamin drinks, chases other men’s wives, and believes in nothing at all. Burton is a rigid Protestant who watches the business with the tree, identifies it immediately and accurately as pagan worship, and eventually girdles the oak to kill it.
After which the rain stops, and does not come back for years.
The Thing a Group Will Catch On
Here is the uncomfortable part, and it is what makes To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck worth an evening.
The novel sides with Joseph.
Burton is not punished for being narrow-minded in some ironic literary way. He kills the tree, and the valley dies. The drought is presented as consequence, not coincidence, and no character with any authority suggests otherwise. When Joseph finally cuts his wrists on a rock in the high glade to give the land what it needs, the rain starts while he is still bleeding.
A reader keeps waiting for the rational floor to appear: the revelation that this is grief, or mania, or a dry cycle in the weather. It never comes. For a writer who spent the following decade on documentary realism about wages and migration, that is an extraordinary position to hold for two hundred pages without blinking.
The Women in To a God Unknown Are the Best Writing
Rama, who is married to the silent Thomas, is the only person in the book who talks to Joseph without either worshipping or fearing him. She is a midwife, contemptuous of most of what men think and do, and the one character who sees that his conviction is both genuine and a kind of illness. Her scenes are the sharpest in the novel.
Elizabeth, the schoolteacher Joseph marries, starts almost as well. She is observant, dryly funny about her awful father, and holds her opinions out of reach by simply never stating them. Then the plot requires something of her and she is gone, which is the clearest failure of nerve in the book.
Where It Will Lose People
Be honest with a group before assigning To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck:
- Three of the four brothers are positions rather than people, and none of them changes.
- There is no humour anywhere, which in Steinbeck is disorienting and makes the solemnity heavy going.
- The symbols arrive constantly and are always explained. Tree, spring, rock, blood, drought.
- The pacing in the middle third is slack, with long stretches where the only development is the weather.
Why To a God Unknown Is Still Worth Reading
Partly for the sentences. Written when he was thirty-one, the descriptions of the valley as a female body, of the green halls and aisles of the forest, are better than anything in the comic novels that made his name.
Mostly, though, for what it shows about where he began. This came out in 1933 and sold badly. Two years later Tortilla Flat made him a comic writer. Three years after that In Dubious Battle made him a political one. The man who wrote those books began as a mystic who thought the land was alive and owed us an answer, and traces of it survive right through to East of Eden twenty years later.
The Valley Does the Work a Villain Usually Does
A group used to novels driven by people will notice something missing here: there is no antagonist.
Burton comes closest, and he acts from conviction rather than malice and disappears from the book soon after. Nobody schemes. Nobody wants Joseph’s land. The nearest thing to a plot against him is weather.
What replaces the villain is the valley itself, which in To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck has appetites, moods and something close to a will. It welcomes the brothers in the first season, gives them extraordinary harvests, and then withdraws. There is a spring in a high glade with a rock beside it that the book treats as the place where the land can be addressed directly, and the Indian who works the ranch avoids it without explanation.
Groups that find the novel slow in its middle are usually reading it as a family drama that has stalled. It is better read as the account of a long negotiation between one man and a landscape, in which the landscape holds every card and eventually names its price.
Questions for the Table
- The novel never offers a rational explanation. Should it have?
- Burton acts on sincere religious conviction and destroys the valley. Is he a villain?
- Why does Steinbeck remove Elizabeth when he does?
- Is Joseph’s final act a sacrifice, a suicide, or both, and does the distinction matter here?
- Father Angelo closes the door. Is that cowardice, wisdom or defeat?
Content notes
Contains a death by the character’s own hand, the loss of a wife, animals dying slowly as the water fails, and a man whose fixation the narrative treats as perception rather than sickness.
After the Last Page
What stays is not the blood on the rock. It is the priest with his hand on the door.
To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck spends its length building a case that something older than the church is operating in that valley, and then gives the last word to the one man professionally obliged to deny it. He listens to the chanting, understands precisely what it means, and decides the rain is more important than the doctrine.
It is a strange, uneven, frequently overwrought novel, and that final gesture is worth the whole of it.