Madness has always dominated the fiction of Canadian Timothy Findley. Invariably his lunatics are cultured, educated, sophisticated and privileged. Setting history on its head and playing with time have long been favourite devices of a writer who manages to be theatrical, fantastic, curiously factual and devoted to storytelling at its most complex. This ninth novel explores the dilemma of its central character, a worldweary art historian desperate for death yet incapable of a successful suicide.
Doomed to immortality, he appears to have wandered the earth since the time of the Greeks and onwards, in various fascinating chapters of history as well as according to references in his private journal. By 1912, when the narrative begins, with what is yet another failed suicide bid, Pilgrim, having confounded science by coming back to life, is rescued by a loyal friend determined to help him.
That friend, the elegant Lady Sybil Quartermaine, is possibly herself quietly insane. Wealth and intelligence enables her to deliver her strange charge to the pioneering and radical mystic, Jung. None of this surprises. From the opening sentence of the prologue, "Wednesday, the 17th of April, 1912" the same date as the sinking of the Titanic, it is clear that Findley is placing his narrative not only on a specific historic date associated forever with unnecessary death and loss, but has also set it at a transitional period of European history with the shadow of war poised to become a reality. In common with his fellow Canadian writer, the late Robertson Davies, Findley not only shares an interest in shaping fictional narrative from historical events and personages, he is also drawn to Jung's theories. Indeed this book is not only characteristic of Findley's previous work, there are echoes of Davies's 1986 Booker Prize runner-up, What's Bred in the Bone. Just as there are of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey, as well as Woolf's Orlando, which also has a gender-defying central character.
Throughout his new novel there is a constant balance of the past versus the present, the role of art, truth and betrayal, the fantastic and the real. It is interesting that the character of this mystery man, known only by the name of Pilgrim, proves cold and unsympathetic. For much of the narrative he behaves like a caged animal, capable of sudden violence. He also refuses to speak, remaining at all times alert to chances of further self-destruction, or at least escape. When he does return to speech, most of his statements refer to his desire. "My only ambition is death." Elsewhere he makes lengthy, overly theatrical declarations, such as: "I am older than the mountains beyond those windows, and like the vampire I despise, I have lived many times, Doctor Jung. Who knows, as Leda I might have been the mother of Helen - or, as Anne, the mother of Mary. I was Orion once, who lost his sight and regained it . . . I stood on the ramparts of Troy and witnessed the death of Hector . . . I am both male and female. I am ageless, and I have no access to death." By the time he sets out to steal the Mona Lisa - he knew Leonardo and didn't much like him - he has lost his place as the centre of the novel.
Findley, who thrives on creating conversations between real and invented characters, cannot resist evoking an authentic sense of tension and rivalry among the staff at the famous Burgholzli Psychiatric Clinic. Jung is seen as a threat by his peers, he has acquired a reputation for taking over patients and there is also the Jungian ego which Findley captures very well. The Jung who emerges from the pages of this book is a dedicated professional in his late 30s, who is excited by his work, but also powerfully aware of himself and his place in history.
Most of all he is a controlling individual. The description of his relationship with his wife Emma, a mother of four and expecting another at the time of the narrative, is shrewdly drawn with an awareness of sexual power shifts. Certainly intellectually well matched with her husband, Emma is not only interested in his work, she is his valued researcher. Their dialogue of equals shifts between the domestic and the professional, and it is impossible not to notice Emma's determined, almost forced, affection. For all her confidence she is warily insecure. Findley deliberately creates a slight hint of distance which goes beyond the great man's preoccupation with his cases.
Not unexpectedly, Jung quickly becomes far more interesting than Pilgrim. For him, as he wrote to Freud, "she does not understand that the prerequisite for a good marriage - or so it seems to me - is a licence to be unfaithful". It must be said that, for all Findley's flair and erudition - he openly delights in fact and detail - this novel is almost too well-constructed, too loaded with facts, while the historical interludes, though vivid and often quite beautiful, appear contrived and overly dependent on research.
However, once the petulant Pilgrim moves beyond being a troubled individual obsessed with achieving his own death and settles into the role of symbolic witness, the novel finds its tone. There is also the fact that it is all so obviously Findley territory. His best novel to date, his stylishly inventive Famous Last Words, which was published in Canada in 1981 but was delayed in the US and even longer in Britain until 1987 for legal reasons, features an all-star cast including the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Hitler, Von Ribbentrop and Charles Lindbergh. Part political thriller, part history, it re-writes history and is overseen by none other than Pound's protege Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
THE fantastic fable, Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) is a witty retelling of the many problems facing the Ark as well as the conflicts dividing Noah's family, while The Telling of Lies (1986) is a murder mystery told through the disarming narrative of Nessa Van Horne. From his debut, The Last of the Crazy People (1969), and throughout his career, Findley has always displayed a lightness of touch. Pilgrim is a dark, sombre work lightened by flashes of manic energy such as the wonderful creation of the doomed ballerina, Countess Blavinskeya, raped by her brother and widowed when her father murdered her husband, and now seeking sanctuary in the harmless belief she lives on the moon. There are also moments of matter-of-fact directness, such as when Pilgrim snaps at Jung, "What on earth is mental health? It sounds like a disease." But there are few laughs. On a broader level, Pilgrim again, as in the case of much of Findley's fiction, testifies to the central role history, and particularly European history, has for Canadian writers.
Discovering the reason behind Pilgrim's death quest does charge the narrative for a time. But this is eventually lost among the wealth of other stories, other lives, Jung's antics and the underlying contradictions Findley draws together in a calculatedly prophetic, if overly orchestrated, novel rich in symbol and ideas.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
