To Jerusalem and Back and Forth

By Paul Gray

PILGERMANN by Russell Hoban; Summit; 240 pages; $13.95

During a pogrom in the dark heart of medieval Europe, a young Jewish man is castrated for having seduced the local tax collector's wife. Through his agony, he hears a voice telling him to go to Jerusalem. It is a popular idea. Half the world seems headed in the same direction, whipped by Pope Urban II into the frenzy that will later be called the First Crusade. The maimed pilgrim boards a ship at Genoa and then finds his progress stalled. He is captured by pirates and put up for sale at a slave market in Tripoli. His purchaser, a wealthy Turkish merchant, immediately negotiates his freedom and brings him home in friendship to Antioch, that unfortunate city whose destiny lies between the Crusaders and their goal. Looking out at the tents of the besieging armies, the German Jew reflects on the oddity of his position: "I stand on this wall built by a Roman emperor and keep watch on the Franks with a Turkish bow in my hand." He dies on a night in June 1098, when the soldiers of Christ sweep into the betrayed fortress.

Such, except for the unsexed hero, is the stuff of rousing historical fiction. Pilgermann is that and several other things as well. In Riddley Walker (1981), his fourth novel, Russell Hoban proved himself a master of the unexpected viewpoint. He imagined life several millenniums after a nuclear holocaust and then invented the debased, fragmented language that survivors might use to rebuild their civilization. This time, Hoban's English is normal, but his speaker-protagonist is not. He introduces himself. "Pilgermann here. I call myself Pilgermann, it's a convenience. What my name was when I was walking around in the shape of a man I don't know, I simply can't remember. What I am now is waves and particles, I don't need to walk around, I just go. When I want to appear I turn up as an owl."

This disembodied voice is speaking in the present tense, now, late in the 20th century, a contemporary witness to old deeds. Hoban invents a spokesman for an entire epoch, one who has not only suffered the mutilation and death of his body but has consciously endured some of the awful burdens of history since those events: "I am a microscopic chip in that vast circuitry in which are recorded all of the variations and permutations thus far. Not all of my experience is available for recall by my Pilgermann identity, only that in which the energy of the input was above a certain level." His memory is random access; he is a computer part that has survived everything, including the First Crusade.

Such a cosmic perspective is broadly audacious, and Hoban's Pilgermann enaudacious, and Hoban's Pilgermann enthusiastically embraces the challenge. He tells what happened to him during his physical stay on earth; he also wants to explain why and to speculate on whether he had any choice in the matter. He knows that his troubles began when he entered the upper-floor bedroom window of Sophia, the tax collector's beautiful wife. Deprived of his manhood in consequence, he debates with his Creator: "O God! Why cannot I speak with a pure heart? I have done wrong and I know it, but how could you put Sophia into the world and expect me not to do wrong? It would be an insult to your creation not to climb ladders for that woman."

Pilgermann's theological musings almost always revolve around paradoxes. For example: "If God has not the power to understand everything he is not omniscient, and equally if he has not the power to create something beyond his understanding he is not omnipotent." It is extremely difficult to say anything original about such metaphysical matters, and Pilgermann does not. As a theologian, he tends toward the tedious. But the quality of his ideas is less important than the restless energy of the mind that forms them. He is trying to grasp what cannot be known. His aim is not to pursue a single train of logic or evidence but to make sense of the universe that contains him. He is not a thinker but an artist.

His tale burns brightest in its succession of images: "It was that sort of a hot still day when one seems particularly to hear the buzzing of flies." A picture from doomed Antioch: "As the sun ascends the morning shadow of the eastern slopes of Silpius withdraws from the city like a transparent purple robe trailed across a floor." Because he still lives as a glitch in the cosmos, Pilgermann can play telescopic tricks with space and time. He remembers the rituals of Passover, the precautionary striking of the side posts and lintels of Jewish dwellings, and makes a leap: "The spattering drops of blood fan slowly, slowly out out, out, the drops of blood become the stars. Far and frozen the luminous drops of burning blood, far and frozen, drifting ever wider wider, wider."

In the end, Pilgermann does live, both as a character in a vivid moment of the historical past and as a living, questing spirit. Hoban successfully creates a pilgrim who once traveled and who has not stopped. His novel is not an easy read only a fascinating and rewarding one. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"Well do we know that in each of us lives a skeleton that waits for the flesh to die, there is an absence waiting for the presence to depart--but a great city! A city like Antioch! As Pilgermann the owl I fly over it now and it looks like nothing really, it has retreated from its medieval boundaries, it has shrunk and dwindled, it has huddled itself together, has drawn back from the vaunt of its greatness and the largeness of its history, it is like a swimmer who has struggled barely alive out of a raging torrent and does not enter the water again. No, I think as I look down on this place that is so small, so diminished, so unspecial, this is not Antioch: Antioch was days and nights of vivid action, Antioch was a paradigm of history on which at one time and another every kind of thinker and doer, every kind of greatness and smallness jostled together and shouldered and elbowed their way through all the lights and resonances and colors, all the smells and flavors and motion of endless variations of circumstance and event in a large and crowded arena. In a particular time people fought and lived and died for particular things; now it is small, now it is quiet." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.