Book Review: ‘The Pilgrimage,’ by John Broderick

In the letters, “there was no threat, no demand for money,” Broderick writes, the tone “as detached as an invitation to a party.” The same could be said of his own narration, so straightforward in its handling of the once-taboo subjects of midcentury Irish queerness, sex and false piety it borders on blasé. “We’re born, we make love, and we die,” Julia thinks. “Why make such a song and dance about it?”

That Broderick writes with the studied coolness of an autopsy report does not detract from the novel’s pleasure; it only reinforces the thematic obsessions with sex and death, life’s great banalities that yet inspire so much passion. The premise of the novel could sound raunchy and playful — a romp toward Lourdes! a sexy servant! a bumbling priest! — but there’s nothing very fun about Julia and Michael’s deceits or desires at all.

Rather, sex in this novel is much like death: an inevitability, and also an escape. When Jim breaks up with Julia, she minimizes not just her sadness, but her personhood: “Nobody was really involved,” she thinks, “just two people who made use of each other.” Similarly, a subplot involving suicide is treated not as a tragedy but as a formality for the Glynns to see to, an extra Mass or two to attend.

The exception is Broderick’s wistful descriptions of Julia’s first lover, Howard, in scattered memories that reveal both the beauty of Broderick’s writing and Julia’s humanity. So much of her daily life, romantic and otherwise, seems to exist only in relation to this man from her past, “the effortless unfolding of golden unhurried hours” she spent with him. All else in Julia’s life is just epilogue, even as the elaborate plans for Lourdes continue and the shocking letters accumulate and Stephen compels and confounds her, even as the seemingly perfect wall the Glynns have been hiding behind begins to buckle and fall.

Catholicism can embody mercy, and it can also breed shame. A sour and lasting portrait of what boils beneath kept-up appearances, Broderick’s once-banned novel inhabits the moral middle ground of the apparently righteous, displaying the desires and confusions of his characters’ inner lives without much mercy, but without judgment, either.