The Leper's Companions
Blackburn, by Julia
O O K S Pilgrimage to the edge of the world Julia Blackburn Rmftron, 522,197 pp. Valerie Sayers ulia Blackburn's odd, compelling little novel opens in the present. Its protagonist is a...
...The pilgrimage, then—that journey to the world where one must give up reason to find faith—has healed our sad traveler and allowed her back into the world of the present...
...On the sea journey, Sally leaps into the sea as her husband has done...
...Valerie Sayers is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and the author of five novels...
...the priest will return to the seaside village alone...
...The priest describes death as a "going out of prison and an ending of exile...
...It does not matter who that person was or what sort of love it had been...
...an old lady who has never had a chance to slow down climbs into bed and orders her long-gone friends and relations to parade before her...
...When the objects of their longing disappear into the sea, they plunge in after...
...In her sorrow and longing, the woman slips from her contemporary world into a seaside village in the year 1410...
...The narrator herself is full of subtle tricks...
...nor is it fully allegory...
...This world always links the physical and the metaphysical: The pleasures one of the characters takes "from the sexual act was quieter and yet more profound, it was like dying, but without the fear...
...They do not hold back those emotions: In the face of their own losses, they grieve and they punish and they fear fully, externally...
...When devils plague them, they cast the devils out...
...The narrator focuses eventually on four characters: Sally, the woman whose husband has disappeared chasing a mermaid...
...The novel's religious motifs and historical framework—the sorrowful woman has entered a world about to experience its renaissance—free it from neat classification...
...The physical world of the late Middle Ages is described in elegant and exact, often terrifying prose, but our narrator is just as focused on the villagers' emotions as she is on their bodily reality...
...I knew then," she says, "that I had reached the edge of the world that the leper had allowed me to share with him...
...A reader searching for tidy allegory Commonweal I 8 May 7,1999 might best search in this pilgrimage half of the book, where the variations on dealing with loss are played to their final notes...
...Lice, fleas, and rats dart through the landscape, the narrator noting them casually...
...The fact was that he had gone and she remained...
...It is a generous novel with its own healing powers...
...His health has been restored through the ministrations of a kind old couple...
...The leper meanwhile has gone off to join the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the desert of Mount Sinai, and the narrator accompanies him until he steps back in a rock cleft at the same moment she steps forward...
...the shoemaker, who is gradually going blind, has the scales fall from his eyes, only to descend into madness...
...The story's plot makes it sound like fantasy, but it doesn't much resemble other works of that genre...
...She comments on the action, appears in it, disappears...
...In the face of all its catastrophes, the novel's tone is so matter-of-fact that, more often than not, it resembles a fairy tale...
...We learn that the leper may have killed his lover, and that it was in trying to escape his loss that he first became afflicted, his sadness devouring his flesh...
...The four set off with the narrator (perhaps they can see and hear her, perhaps they cannot) on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem which makes up the second half, and the second year, of the story...
...and a leper who has been healed...
...The Leper's Companions is a tightly compressed novel with precise and poetic language...
...The narrator believes what the villagers believe: that dragons and mermaids exist and that saints will intercede for us...
...The shoemaker's widow—she who grieves with such grace, by crying loudly and then putting her sorrow aside—finds her dead husband in a shoemaker's shop in the town of Ram, before she ever reaches the Holy City...
...After the narrative build of the journey, the time the last two pilgrims spend in Jerusalem flashes too quickly by (and the reader is reminded, if reminder is needed, that this is not a religious novel: Christian symbolism takes no more weight than the magical symbolism that has been scattered through the rest of the novel...
...It is not a fairy tale, however...
...Its protagonist is a woman who has "lost someone she loved...
...Like her earlier novel, The Book of Color, Blackburn's new book is quite startling in the beginning...
...She moves the historical passages from past to present tense and back again...
...nor is it simply magical realism...
...a leper asks the priest to perform the Burial of the Dead over his living body...
...In the first half of the novel, which spans a year, she comes to know the villagers and their own sorrows and partings...
...the priest of the village, the man of learning, a fearful soul who goes to great lengths to calm the villagers' fears...
...the shoemaker's widow, who has shepherded her husband through blindness and madness and death with unwavering love...
...The pregnant Sally loses her fisherman husband to the sea when he goes seeking a mermaid...
...When he goes off to wrestle with the Jordan River, he loses the leper...
...She has left her world of contemporary reality to seek out those who, unburdened by the rationalism of the modern age, understand viscerally the dreadful power of death, disease, and madness...
...Locked with the leper in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the priest eats eggs and bread, a good allegorical meal, by candlelight...
...Hunger hovers along the periphery of everyone's vision...
...As the grieving woman moves from the present to the distant past, she takes on the form of a first-person narrator and enters the story as a kind of floating observer...
...but as a reader becomes accustomed to the world it creates, it feels familiar and inevitable...
Vol. 126 • May 1999 • No. 9
