Pilgermann, long dead – a spirit consisting of waves and particles – contemplates the vicissitudes of being…“As far as I could see, the will of God was simply that everything possible would indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice was ours, the reckoning His. And He was in us, one couldn’t get away from Him, that was the Fire of it, that was the Garden of it, at the centre of every soul and contiguous with infinity. The possibilities of choice were beyond all calculation and the probability of wrong choice so high as to be almost a certainty. Only God could think of such a game, and only humans would bother to play it.”If Dante Alighieri had once fashioned The Divine Comedy then Russell Hoban created a divine black comedy…“‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but why would a church want the head of Pontius Pilate?’‘How could they not want him?’ she says. ‘What kind of relics have they got? They’ve got Christ’s foreskin and Mary’s afterbirth and three hairs from Joseph’s arse but what about the man who made Christianity possible? What if Pilate hadn’t washed his hands? What if he’d turned Jesus loose and let him go on preaching, what then, hey?’”And a mystical one as well…“Sometimes I manifest myself as an owl painted by Bosch and in this way I fly through the skies of his paintings and observe what is happening.”And metaphysical too…“While humankind exists there can only be the rotation of God’s impossible requirements and humankind’s repeated failures. Indeed, what is God but an impossible requirement? Any possible requirement would not be God.”There are three great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And there are three great gods: Yahweh, Holy Trinity and Allah. They all are preaching peace but crying for blood…
I’m a huge fan of Russell Hoban but I couldn’t finish this one. It’s way, way out there. It was published in the early 80s but feels like something that could have been written twenty years prior in a haze of either spiritual or pharmaceutical intoxication, or both. The author describes it as a kind of sequel to his brilliant ‘Riddley Walker’, but I found it hard to make too many comparisons between the two.The plot, if it can be said to exist, follows a jew named Pilgermann who is thrown to an anti-semitic mob after an illicit tryst with the wife of a rich merchant. He is castrated and enters a state of wandering semi-death, and finds himself a pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem. The result is a combination between a serious meditation of religion, time and history, and a kind of picaresque road novel which approximates Henry Fielding via Brueghel. It’s really weird, and not (I think) entirely successful.But Hoban remains a good writer even when I can’t fully appreciate what he’s doing, and there are flashes of brilliance:‘When one is a child, when one is young, when one has not yet reached the age of recognition, one thinks that the world is strong, that the strength of God is endless and unchanging. But after the thing has happened--whatever that thing might be--that brings recognition, then one knows irrevocably how very fragile is the world, how very, very fragile; it is like one of those ideas that one has in dreams: so clear and so self-explaining are they that we make no special effort to remember. Then of course they vanish as we wake and there is nothing there but the awareness that something very clear has altogether vanished.’
What do You think about Pilgermann (2002)?
Sometimes you just have an affinity for an author and it seems that they can do no wrong in your eyes; that's how it is with me and Russell Hoban. I've read four of his novels so far, and while they've all been amazing works in their own way, Pilgermann might be my favorite. A less "difficult" read than Riddley Walker, but certainly no less allusive and filled with meaning. A re-read will be necessary for me to feel like I've extracted anywhere near enough value out of the words to be worthy of reading them. Even then I feel certain that I'll inevitably fall short, as more confidently plunging into the depths forged by Hoban will only reveal further depths that were previously undetected. It doesn't give up its riches easily, but that only makes each nugget of wisdom dug up, each "connexion" made, feel all the more rewarding.This is ostensibly an historical novel, and it has elements of being a fantasy novel, but what it is, ultimately, is a meditation on life, death, God, man, infinity, and beyond. I mention it in the same breath as Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers because in my mind they are of a piece; beautiful, philosophical,meditative works informed by Judeo-Christian arcana and mythology, revolving around the idea of time as a wheel, history as a circle that keeps repeating itself. They're both stunning; Pilgermann just has the advantage of being about 1,250 pages shorter. But read 'em both.
—Rod
