A Review of Timothy Findley’s “Pilgrim”
On Mortality
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked as a writer at a non-profit agency that dealt with microfiche. My job was to look at rolls of microfilm and write summaries of what was on the rolls as part of a collection. My boss at the time, having read some of my fiction, enthusiastically recommended that I read Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim. Based on my somewhat fabulist writing, she thought that I would get a lot of mileage out of reading the book. Well, it has taken me many years, but I finally got around to reading the book. I’m not sure why it took this long. It might have to do with the fact that Findley is a bit of a hot/cold writer for me. I liked his book The Wars, which won accolades and awards up here in Canada, but I wasn’t so keen on Headhunter. Plus, the plot synopsis for Pilgrim led me to believe that it would be a slow, boring book.
In any event, I’ve now read the novel, and I have to say that I was somewhat surprised by it. I can see why it was recommended to me — set in the year 1912, the plot centres on a man named Pilgrim who desperately wants to die and has lived a long life, it seems; he knew Da Vinci intimately, for instance. However, his suicide attempts always end in failure — he successfully dies, but is magically then brought back to life. It is after one such attempt that Pilgrim’s upper crust handlers squirrel him away from his home in England to a clinic in Zürich, where he is assessed by none other than Carl Jung. It is Jung and his associates that try to save Pilgrim from what they feel are delusions, but does Pilgrim have other plans?
Pilgrim is a bit of a strange book, not only for its plot but because it feels as though the author wrote it without a net. There are a ton of narrative threads in this book, and, to be honest, they kind of begin to unravel halfway through the book, which speeds to a conclusion where the Mona Lisa is stolen and a church is burned down. It’s as though Findley was unsure where he was going to step next, but just kept moving for the sake of moving. Despite this deficiency, the book is enjoyable and relatively solid. The first 100 pages or so of this 500-page book are a bit slow, but things begin to pick up in earnest. It’s an interesting novel about mortality, made all the more poignant by the fact that Findley wrote this towards the end of his life. (The book was published in 1999; Findley died in 2002.) One gets the sense that Findley was growing weary with his time on earth and just wanted to get on with it. I’m not saying that Pilgrim is one long suicide note, not at all, but there’s a sense of authorial finality with this work, as though Findley believed this would be his last piece of writing. (It wasn’t — he had one more novel in him.)
There are little things that I like about Pilgrim. For one, the fictional version of Jung is entertaining. He has conversations with himself that are sometimes hilarious, and his hand-wringing over the treatment of his patient, Pilgrim, offers a great deal of narrative heist. I did think his wife, Emma, was a bit of a milquetoast; her dialogue is so brimming with optimism even in trying times that you wonder why Findley didn’t just add the word “golly!” to the end of her sentences. Even though, too, most of the book spends its time in the enclosed space of a clinic, it’s not a stuffy setting. In fact, for a book about interiors and what’s going on in the mind, the space leads itself to a sort of feeling of claustrophobia that makes this novel tight and gripping.
However, as I alluded to beforehand, the novel really does begin to get aimless about halfway through. The bits about Da Vinci are interesting, but as most of the backstory is told via Pilgrim’s journals, the book becomes many novels within a novel, and begins to lose steam as Findley keeps on adding memory after memory, such as being at the fall of Troy and being a gadabout who hung out with Oscar Wilde. The ending is a bit underwhelming, as well — in fact, it all feels rather unresolved. It’s as though Findley committed himself to writing a big, 500-page book and as he got closer to that goal, he just quit. The reader is forced to either believe Pilgrim’s wild predicament or wonder if he was truly mad. There doesn’t seem to be much resolution any which way. Still, Pilgrim is enjoyable if one comes to it with lowered expectations. That might be odd to say about a book that made the shortlist for the Giller Prize after its publication, but it is what it is. It’s a meandering, wordy and unfocused novel that offers bright glimmers of promise and works as a kind of brain food for those who like their literary diet to tickle that organ. There’s little doubt that Findley was a talented Canadian writer, so for those who are curious, I’d say give this a try.
I’m going to be focusing on reviewing some older books of interest, such as this one, as a bit of an experiment to see if people actually read older book reviews, plus I want to focus on some books that I’ve meant to get around to but never had owing to the fact that I usually review books in advance of their publication date. I’ll see if this experiment works or not — but Pilgrim is my first foray into this wild, blue yonder. It was a book that I meant to get around to reading, but never did until now. I’m glad I made the time for it, though, and hope that you’ll join me as I discover some older works of fiction in the upcoming weeks that have been in my pile of unread books for quite some time. Pilgrim is a first shot, and we’ll see what else is to be uncovered.
Timothy Findley’s Pilgrim was published by HarperFlamingoCanada in 1999.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
