The Pilgrimage

I’m going to start this review by saying: READ THIS BOOK.

The Pilgrimage by John Broderick is a riveting soap opera of a story about a wealthy couple living in a midcentury Irish town. The story is told from the perspective of the wife, Julia, who begins the novel having an affair with Jim, her husband’s nephew (and doctor). Her husband, Michael, is a closeted (natch) gay man who is also disabled and spends all his time in bed being tended to by a handsome servant named Stephen.

Michael, despite his ‘nature’ is devoted to the church. He is determined to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in the hopes that he will be healed from his affliction. Julia, believing this to be a fool’s errand, nevertheless supports the idea and assists in the planning. The two of them decide that Jim and Stephen should accompany them on their journey, and they obtain their consent.

The entire novel spans several weeks and months as they prepare for their spiritual journey. A plot centering on Julia’s relationships, first with Jim and then with Stephen, begins to unfold. Julia is the sole woman among this cast of male characters, and she defies the ‘idealized’ Catholic wife stereotype. She is practical, sleeping with other men as a way to satisfy her physical desires, uninterested in forming any real attachment to them. Throughout the book, she views events and people clinically with an almost utilitarian outlook. She has no faith and very little interest in pretending otherwise.

When anonymous letters begin to arrive, threatening to uncover her secret affair with Jim, Julia becomes preoccupied with trying to find the source. This leads to her (correct) suspicion that Stephen is the author of the letters. Stephen, in turn, is confused about his own sexuality and attaches himself to Julia, claiming to be in love with her. He is less interested in sex than in other forms of intimacy, which Julia finds extremely discomforting.

As I said, this is all very soap-y… but in a good way! A surface-level reading of the book makes it a fun diversion. A deeper reading, however, allows us to encounter so many of the social and religious factors that confronted the author, himself a gay Irishman, during his lifetime. In The Pilgrimage, we discover a world of black-and-white ideology built upon a multi-colored rainbow of human experience. It is an insistent and rebellious telling of the reality of life under the heavy hand of a conservative, even oppressive environment that defines each of the characters’ motives while undermining their identities.

The Pilgrimage was banned in Ireland after it was published, which is a perfectly good reason in and of itself to read it. But it’s also a powerful, unflinching look at how human beings construct ideals that fail to take into consideration the reality of who we are – and the (sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic) folly that results.

Again: READ IT.