Pilgrim (Paperback)

Throughout the story we are given glimpses of Pilgrim's past lives - imagined or real; but the majority of the story is actually concerned with Pilgrim's incarceration and Carl Jung. This is the most disappointing aspect of the story - the tantalising glimpses of Leonardo da Vinci, Teresa of Avila, the Cathedral at Chartres - none of this is really developed. Rather, we have long passages on the turmoil in Jung's mind (which I found quite boring) and fragmentary insights into Pilgrim's thoughts. I kept waiting for the story of these past lives to be more fully developed, but nothing ever comes of it.

The other disappointment with this book is the main characters- you cannot sympathise with them. Jung comes across as a right prat, probably because he was in real life. Pilgrim is just too absent and intangible, you can't feel anything for him. Even Sibyl Quatermaine comes across as a self-absorbed, silly woman when she really could have been something else. Rather, it is the secondary characters that were most interesting - Jung's long suffering wife Emma, Pilgrim's attendant Kessler. But because they are not primary characters, they are treated like the stories of Pilgrim's past lives - we are only given tantalising glimpses and left wishing we were given more.

I feel that this was a brilliant premise, but Findley has missed the mark either by trying to be too clever ("look how much insight I have into the mind and motivations of Jung" type of thing) or by trying to fit too much in and never developing one idea enough to be fulfilling. I kept reading, waiting for the really interesting part to start. Yet it never did. And the ending - I don't want to give anything away, so I will only say that it was just too silly.

Pilgrim is a man/woman/spirit/consciousness who has been admitted to a Swiss psychiatric hospital because of his repeated suicide attempts. All attempts, though seeming at first to have succeeded, actually failed, thus "condemning" him, somewhat like Woolf's Orlando, to live forever.

His encounters with famous people throughout history constitute a remarkable chronicle of certain historical periods. His relationship with C.G. Jung, during the years when the latter was developing his theory of the collective unconscious, is particularly intriguing.

I couldn't categorize this book as history, biography, fantasy, psychiatry, psychology, mystery. It defies many of the basic "rules" of any one of these designations and may, therefore, cause some discomfort in a reader who prefers strict logic, easy-to-follow story line, or predictable form. But it's quite a ride for those interested in the exploratory!