Pilgrim
Description
$35.00
ISBN 0-00-224258-3
DDC C813'.54
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.
Review
Timothy Findley may well be the leading contemporary writer of
melodrama, and it is important to recognize that he is writing within
this well-known, if not officially respectable, subgenre of fiction.
Some misguided commentators classify him as a realist, claiming that the
world really is as corrupt, violent, and doom-laden as he says it is,
and that his favorite madhouse setting (Pilgrim focuses on the
Bьrgholzli clinic in Zьrich, where Jung once worked) is an adequate
metonymy for the world we inhabit. But this is a misreading. Findley’s
world is as creatively selective on one extreme of experience as any
sentimental comedy is on another.
Pilgrim is in many respects vintage Findley. Indeed, it might be
regarded as the summation of his work. It presents the characteristic
Findley world of madness, violence, and loveless sexuality, and it is
packed full of his habitual obsessions: fire, sudden death, secret
drinking, bizarre turns of plot. Familiar mottoes from earlier work are
repeated: “Pay attention,” “Earth, air, fire, water,” even (a
bit surprisingly) “against despair.”
The novel is most reminiscent, perhaps, of Famous Last Words (1981), in
that a whole series of historical figures—most notably Carl Jung,
Leonardo da Vinci, St. Theresa of Avila—rub shoulders with Findley’s
own highly imaginative inventions. History is unabashedly rewritten,
but, as in Famous Last Words, some of the more troubling incidents turn
out to be authentic.
Above all, we experience Findley’s superb dramatic inventiveness and
control, both presented in a prose that is invariably crisp, clear, and
persuasive. As we read, we are under a spell, and one cannot but admire
his narrative skill and his cleverness as a creator of suspense. Whether
he has the ultimate profundity of a great novelist is another matter.
Those who have admired the best of Findley in the past will love
Pilgrim; the not-yet-converted are unlikely to be won over. Personally,
I find him absorbing, impressive, intellectually seductive, but not,
after the immediate impact has worn off, fully satisfying. Yet Pilgrim
shows him to be a consummate practitioner of performance-art.