I have just experienced an exposition of ‘Virtue’ in a most powerful spiritual and intellectual manifestation in a book, a work of fiction: Star Pilgrim by Simon Small. The author, who has lived in Glastonbury for a number of years as an ordained priest in the Church of England, has just been appointed Chaplain of the Abbey House Retreat Centre. His book is the story of a journey that transports the reader from a present-day England redolent of William Blake’s Albion, complete with its own dreams and visions, through a fascinating series of sojourns before returning ‘home’.
The journey is described in three threads: the geographic, the intellectual and the spiritual, but the most significant and paradoxical element is the concept of ‘home’ to which all three threads return.
He had never left home. The deepest truth of who he was still danced in love with its source, as it had from the beginning of time. Nothing else was possible. The created could not leave its author. Existence was one and could contain no gaps. Yet within that oneness another part of him swirled, enraptured in its own dance. He was called also to create for he was an expression of the eternal creative impulse. So he was the dance and the dancer.
This book works on many levels. Like Pullman it moves effortlessly from action adventure to considered science fiction to a most intelligently contemplative dimension that it defies simple appreciation.
Anamnesis – literally loss of forgetfulness – also plays a very significant part in the story: [He] knew in that moment of anamnesis that something with roots deep in the past was coming to fruition, through the present, into the future and that he was at the centre of whatever it was. For a few seconds the sense of hidden purpose to his life felt overwhelming.
T. S. Eliot – in Little Gidding – explored a similar theme nearly 70 years ago:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well.
Quick now, here, now, always – A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well.
Simon’s characters are totally convincing and have a strongly positive and optimistic quality. This is not a Panglossian optimism of the ego but much more spiritual in nature, as in the words of Julian of Norwich, borrowed by T. S. Eliot in the last two lines of above quotation. The characters are somewhat reminiscent of those created by Nevil Shute – ordinary people drawn into acts of great courage and tenacity by circumstances that they wouldn’t have chosen but simply accept as their lot, and with the support of disparate strangers who join the action because they choose to.
Whilst nothing, I guess, is new there is always someone out there who can take a timeless concept and express it in a way that is new, fresh and possibly in the spirit of the zeitgeist of the day. I believe that Simon’s Star Pilgrim will satisfy this desire for many people. In my case I had the most disconcerting feeling that Star Pilgrim had been written specifically for me – a bit like viewing a portrait whose subject’s eyes seem to follow one about the gallery. The story works on so many levels that I think that every reader will have her or his own ‘take’ and find a personal meaning in Star Pilgrim, a meaning which will endure.
Richard Wood-Penn is a SOF member living in Northampton.
The name of Lambeth immediately brings to mind the Palace. Once this was the manor of Lambeth, a Priory, held by the monks of Rochester, but in 1197 it was acquired by Archbishop Hubert Walter to provide the Archbishop of Canterbury with a London home – Kent being a long way off from Westminster. Lambeth was convenient, being beside the river which, before the 1880s embankment was built, ran close up to the Palace walls. Still standing are the Lambeth Stairs, four solid steps up and five down, used by bargemen and their passengers when ferrying across and back. The Palace’s impressive gateway, Morton’s Tower, was built around 1490, Cardinal Morton’s doing, and added to the Lollards’ five storey structure, whose name came from prisoners kept there who were followers of the fourteenth century religious reformer, John Wycliffe, as well as others who criticised the Church with its wealth and use of images. – they were deemed heretics. In a room at the top, iron rings can be seen welded into the stone walls where prisoners were shackled. The Tower has a Tudor entrance and porter’s lodge.
Reviewing Star Pilgrim by Simon Small, O Books (Ropley, Hants, 2011), pbk, 371 pages, £12.99.