Pilgrimage
September 2012
Celeste has not had an easy lot: her father died early; her mother’s second husband deserted the family with their life’s savings; and she regrets not having been able to have children with her solid husband Tom. Still, closing in on fifty, as a successful paediatrician with material security, she has made a life for herself that counterweights so many of her disappointments. She sees the best and worst of what happens to sick and sometimes dying children. She knows what medical science can and cannot do. But, having abandoned religion in her teens, it has become her only faith.
Now her mother, Patricia, has been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. While the prognosis is typically bleak, Patricia refuses to accept it and pegs her hopes on a pilgrimage to a small Romanian village where miracle cures have been attributed to visions of the Virgin Mary. But Patricia can’t get there from Melbourne without help. Despite her profound misgivings, Celeste agrees to join her and her much younger half-sister Nathalie on the journey their mother so earnestly wants to take.
The trip through Romania occupies the bulk of the novel and goes the way of all good literary journeys. There is diversion (tourism), the wise guide with a secret (the handsome, but very serious Stefan), obstacles (slow trains, menacing gypsies – yes really – and a flat battery).
All the way, Celeste’s scepticism about the worth of the pilgrimage is relentless. What she cannot accept, what she actively resents, given the obstacles life has thrown her way, is that her mother’s faith in a Just God has remained steadfast.
One suspects that Celeste believes that if she did not hold aloft the standard of doubt, of being able to look through the obfuscations, ulterior motives and false comforts of the church, then all would be lost.
While it’s easy to identify with Celeste’s intransigent disapproval of the comforts of superstition and religion, I wonder whether it is a little overplayed. After Celeste buys an apple from a gypsy, Stefan suggests they stop at a cave which is said to overcome women’s infertility. She fairly barks at him: “‘Do you know what I call such legends? Old wives’ tales. Ignorant talk.’ She looked at the apple in her hand. Under its rosy skin it would be floury or sour: another trick, at her expense.” Celeste is suspicious at this and every turn.
Of course this is the entire point. Celeste is so tightly wound that her undoing is inevitable. And what she is really wound up about is death. While she doesn’t flinch from looking hard at it, she isn’t immune from its terrors. Some of Halloran’s best and most clinically intelligent prose is reserved for Celeste’s angst about death, the moment when ‘the brain slowed and stopped forever its industry’.
Halloran asks us to imagine whether it might not be alright for a rational atheist to compromise once in a while, to accept that wonder, even secular wonder, can be useful, that it can help us take steps into the future, especially when it is so irrevocably finite.
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