Books: Pilgrim

For this psych-fi chiller, Timothy Findley’s choice of psychiatrist is not the over-familiar Sigmund Freud but his rival Carl Jung, herald of the theory of collective unconscious. Jung’s fictive patient, known as Pilgrim, is an X-Filer’s dream and an HMO’s nightmare: every time he dies, he comes back to life. Pilgrim is obviously a dramatization of Jung’s doctrines. Too obviously. The action is bracketed by the 1912 sinking of the Titanic and the first day of World War I in 1914, and the apocalyptic deep-think brings to mind Peter DeVries’ remark about a writer who figuratively puts his readers in a diving bell and takes them down 3 ft.

–By R.Z. Sheppard