With dismal stories
Christopher Howse
FAITHFUL DEPARTURES: TRAVELS WITH CATHOLIC PILGRIMS by Stephen Walsh Viking. £10.99, pp. 274, ISBN 0670879126 It was on a Catholic pilgrimage like one described by Stephen Walsh that, for the first time as an adult, I was almost killed. A Mancunian chiropodist mistook me for the devil. It was in Israel, and the pilgrimage organisers (travel agents, really) had made us all, two by two, share rooms on a kibbutz. I first realised I was in for trouble when the chiropodist asked, 'Who put that corpse on my bed?' Well, it wasn't me; indeed, it wasn't anyone, for there was no corpse to be seen. When the strangling attempt began, I fled in my dressing-gown. If you have ever tried fleeing from a schizoid foot-specialist at 1 am you will know that when you knock on a door and ask for help, the door stays shut.
Obviously I found help eventually, or I would not be here to mention it, but the experience did illustrate the difficulty of writing about pilgrimages. To the outsider, as the writer must somehow always be, pilgrimages can be fearfully dull unless extraneous excitements force their way in. Stephen Walsh was not kidnapped by Albanians en route for Medjugorje, nor was he obliged to take up cannibalism with the survivors of an air crash on the way to Lourdes. Instead he is good at giving the oppressive atmosphere of damp Pakamacs, the numbing blare of the unfocused oncoach video (not The Godfather but Padre Pio) and the throb of early morning hangovers in the cold mountain rain of BosniaHerzegovina.
You can almost hear one of Stephen Walsh's big-bosomed, Number Six-smoking, Cork-accented pilgrims reading out bits of his book and laughing to show how broadminded she is.
Now, will you hear this. Here's a bit that'll tickle you. Stephen's .got a bit about St Neot at the beginning of this chapter. Will you listen while I read it to you 'Some accounts of St Neot say that he was only 15 inches high, which may explain why he was followed by "a small band of apostles." ' God, but that's good. A small band of apostles. He's a great sense of humour has our Stephen.
His book certainly does not make you want to go to Lourdes or anywhere. Actually Lourdes has its points even without the grotto. I once had a discussion about the right to bear firearms with an excited American on the battlements of the castle in the morning and then whizzed around a network of stalactite-hung caves on an electric wagon-way under the mountains in the afternoon before a four-course French dinner and an evening thunderstorm; not a cripple in sight the whole day. And it is possible to write interestingly about the shrine and the tourist town, where images of the Virgin decorate the handles of flick knives in shop windows; Patrick Marnham did so a few years ago in his own book, Lourdes.
But it is hard to find a new angle in the crowded travel-book market. Off the authors go in the footsteps of Coryat by vintage Rolls-Royce, or round South America by motor-bike in the tyre-tracks of Che Guevara. Nicholas Luard walked to Santiago grieving his dead daughter; later this year we are to get Ben Nimmo walking to Santiago grieving his murdered girlfriend.
Stephen Walsh's book is not really about pilgrimages, naturally. Just as his previous jaunt, Heartbreak Spoken Here, was a journey through the breakdown of his marriage to the accompaniment of Country and Western, so this is a return trip to his teens, during which he had trouble with girls and lost his faith. On balance I think it would have been better for him not to keep bringing in Stephen Dedalus.
The passages about the teenage Walsh were compelling enough to make me read them as a series before returning to the travel stuff which they punctuate. Once he gets going on memories he forgets about having to produce fine writing, such as his introductory comment on his marital status:
Living in sin, some would call it; I prefer to call it the real (or perhaps the modern) world, but I suspect that camels and eyes of needles probably will come into it somewhere, and that, when the chips are down (whatever I may believe or not believe), the band will be playing Oh, you'll never get to heaven, it's my song.
Beats me. But anyway, the young Walsh lived in Scotland, the child of first-generation Irish immigrants making their way into the middle classes and sending him in a blazer with a badge on the pocket to be taught the names of Mass vestments by Jesuit priests who had lost their bearings with the coming of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Wee Stephen is not to be won over by guitar-strumming 'folk' Masses, and despite a conversation with a sincere young Jesuit about spiritual realities, he shuffles off into the real (or perhaps modern) world as a Tucked-up Kafflick'.
`Kafflick' is the tribal badge that Walsh invents to designate the particular disintegrating cultural context in which he was fucked up. Used a few hundred times, Kafflick loses much of its entertainment value. In any case, I'm not sure Stephen Walsh wouldn't have been fucked up as a scion of the Syon Chapel, as an occasionally conforming Non-conformist, as a not particularly strict Strict and Particular Baptist. Sorry, but I'm slipping into the sort of religious free-association joshing that is expected in Faithful Departures. On page 37 we find something said 'with threatening smoothness, with almost extreme unction', and two pages later: 'I'm clearly in her eyes, in need of a short sharp shock, some extreme unction'. As for the word 'venial', I suspect the publisher is to blame for printing it instead of 'venal' a couple of times (pages 22 and 66), because on page 195 the author defines it more less correctly. But what the fuck this fucked-up Kafflick means by 'venial' on page 11 is anyone's guess.
This bloke Stephen, the unheroic wandering consciousness binding this book together, although a schoolmaster of some kind, is not afraid of using ballsy words like 'balls' (even little Bernadette of Lourdes gets a tollocking' from her mother). And he is keen on street-credible off-the-peg one-joke fits-all phrases like 'head honcho' for the Superior General of the Society of Jesus and suchlike.
In a less jivy epilogue Walsh gives one last chance to the religion in which he was brought up by going to see the Pope say Mass in Rome. But he gets up too late, and makes do with watching on telly an image of 'the supreme one slumped in a chair'. Seeing a statue of Apollo and Daphne the next day is much more wonderful. So that's that.
Christopher Howse is comment editor of The Daily Telegraph.
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