The winds of hope in Leif Enger’s novel I Cheerfully Refuse are stronger than the brutalizing gusts on Lake Superior.

Perhaps no line in the book better summarizes the doom alongside the stubborn hopefulness embodied by the story’s main character, Rainy, than a comment from his book-loving wife, Lark, who is trying to open her own bookshop. After Lark makes her first purchase of books for the shop, Rainy asks her how she’s feeling about the endeavor. She replies, “Probably doomed and perplexingly merry” (180).

Nearly everyone in this novel is “probably doomed.” It’s difficult to capture in a review the many twists and turns through which Enger takes his readers. While the primary theme is one of hope and optimism, the road meanders through a dystopian near-future landscape populated by “astronauts” and corpses.

Near-Dystopian Background

The plot of I Cheerfully Refuse doesn’t involve an asteroid that threatens life on earth, or a malicious disease that diminishes the population, or any kind of “act of God” that brings the end near. Rather, the quasi-dystopian setting is a believable situation humans have brought on themselves.

The book begins with a comet—Tashi—that’s not going to hit the earth. If Enger wanted one of those kinds of apocalyptic narratives, he had the tools present as early as the second page. While the astronomic catastrophe is averted, readers are greeted with an ominous foretaste: “These comets never bring luck to a living soul, that’s all I know” (2).

These words of doom play out over the next 300 pages. Society has collapsed as 16 megawealthy families, dubbed “astronauts,” own nearly everything. A new drug has convinced droves of citizens that suicide is the best route to “go in search of better” (62). Reading has been so marginalized that the country has proudly elected its first “illiterate president” (30).

This is the setting in which we meet the protagonists, Rainy and Lark. The couple meets in the local library, where Rainy first finds a warm place to eat his lunch. As he overhears the librarian give reading suggestions to patrons with care, he falls in love first with her voice and eventually begins to pick up the books she recommends to others. It’s fitting for Rainy and Lark’s relationship to start through words: Lark becomes not only Rainy’s wife but his doorway into the world of books and the love of reading.

Bound by a Book

Books bring Lark into Rainy’s life, and books also bring another significant individual into the protagonists’ circle—Kellan. Shrouded in mystery and mischief, Kellan boards in Lark and Rainy’s home. He brings with him an unpublished manuscript, I Cheerfully Refuse, by Lark’s favorite author, Molly Thorn. The manuscript becomes the link between the unimpressive but stable life that Lark and Rainy have built for themselves and the world of pain that will come their way.

As he overhears the librarian give reading suggestions to patrons with care, he falls in love first with her voice and eventually begins to pick up the books she recommends to others.

Kellan doesn’t only bring with him the book Lark has been searching for since she was 12. Unbeknownst to his hosts, he also brings with him thousands of stolen doses of a new suicide drug, “Willow.” A life-threatening manhunt is on his heels, led by a man named Werryck.

Werryck’s character in the unfolding narrative is fantastical. It’s rumored he hasn’t slept in 17 (or maybe 42) years. Having outgrown the need for rest, he’s unnervingly calm and heartlessly ruthless. His introduction comes with an ominous warning:

He never comes in the door you expect. There is no preparing for Werryck . . . there’s no spotting him early. You think he won’t come but he will. You’re strong and big? Doesn’t matter. Listen to me. When you see him standing in your kitchen, you slip out the back. Be quiet, be quick. Don’t hunt for your wallet. Don’t grab a coat. Go out the window if you have to. (34)

Werryck’s presence in the story leads to the closing of Lark’s. Having lost Lark and all that’s most important to him, Rainy is forced to spend the rest of the story in a dilapidated sailboat, running for his life on Lake Superior. Still, moving from port to port, making friends and enemies along the way, Rainy refuses to give up his wife’s ideas of the good and beautiful. He gains an unexpected father role to his partner on the lam—an orphaned girl named Sol—until, at the end, they both end up face-to-face with the “godlike” Werryck aboard his mysterious medicine ship.

Deep Tones

As the book opens, Labrino, Rainy and Lark’s friend, shows up with his unfettered pessimism in hand. Labrino is “lonely and kind and occasionally rude by accident, but above all things he was a worried man” (2). He arrives at Rainy’s house filled with illogical worry over what will befall them because of the Tashi Comet. We can’t understand the significance of this scene until much later.

But instead of correcting Labrino in words, Rainy does something that marks his character throughout the story—he turns to his bass guitar:

I opened my mouth, then remembered a few things about my friend. He had a grown son living in a tent on top of a landfill in Seattle. A daughter he’d not heard from in two years. His wife had enough of him long ago, and he was blind in one eye from when he tried to help a man crouched by the road and got beaten unconscious for his trouble. (3)

And so Rainy simply asks, “Is there anything you’d like to hear?” (3). It works: “I fetched my bass, a five-string Fender Jazz, and my tiny cube of a practice amp. Labrino was calmed by deep tones” (4). While Enger never comes out and says it in the book, I’m convinced that Rainy’s commitment to the soothing power and beauty of the “deep tones” is key to understanding not only Rainy himself but the larger story.

Even as Rainy and Sol run into the worst of fates later—captured and held prisoner by Werryck on his medicine ship—the importance of beauty and the deep tones remains. Every night, the godlike Werryck calls Rainy to his private quarters to play music.

Here, readers see a major distinction between the protagonist and antagonist, Rainy and Werryck. Rainy is in tune with something deeper and more profound than his immediate circumstances: beauty. Whether it’s innate or something he caught from Lark, Rainy has the deep tones running through him. His commitment to the beautiful, the true, and the good keeps him going amid his worst plights.

Listen for Transcendence

On the other hand, Werryck’s commitments lie squarely with pragmatism and power. Maybe no line of Werryck’s more clearly reveals his detachment from beauty and goodness than when Rainy speaks up on behalf of other prisoners whom Werryck is torturing. Werryck argues to Rainy that punishing his subjects is just; they’ve broken their contracts. Rainy responds, “The paperwork is in your favor, but I’m appealing to your humanity” (294). Werryck’s response sounds like something straight from C. S. Lewis’s N.I.C.E., in That Hideous Strength: “You use that word ‘humanity’ as though it represents your favorite set of virtues. It doesn’t and it never did.”

His commitment to the beautiful, the true, and the good keeps him going amid his worst plights.

Faced with evil and a multitude of reasons for despair—embodied by Werryck, the “astronauts,” and those aboard the medicine ship—Rainy continues to move toward the good while producing beauty among chaos. Yet the story doesn’t bring optimism center stage in a way that’s too on-the-nose or cheesy. Rather, Enger gives us a story with despair, loss, and pain—but a story in which suffering doesn’t have the final word.

Based on reading the news, the story told in I Cheerfully Refuse will resonate with many Christians. We too often feel we’re “probably doomed.” And yet may we, like Rainy and Sol, know the power of the good, the true, the beautiful. May we too have ears to hear the deep bass tones, that we may cheerfully refuse to give up hope.