Merrie England; A Journey Through the Shire - Book 29

Merrie England; A Journey Through the Shire, by Joseph Pearce is a short and emotional read; a book about the author's Catholic pilgrimage through England of yesteryear.  It is charming, full of interesting hidden history, and, I thought, full of sadness too.  It seemed to me the pilgrim's heart was aching all the while he walked, enjoyed the glories of his tromps across the the countryside and witnessing the beauties he is seeking out.  Pearce is channeling Hilaire Belloc here and he even ends the journey by visiting Belloc's home and burial site.

Pearce refers to himself in third person throughout the book, simply as the pilgrim.  He visits the sites of old saints, some of whom I knew of, some whose names merely rang a distant bell in my mind, and some who were truly obscure to me.  The pilgrim decided to seek out the eternal trinity of the Good, the True and the Beautiful and ignore as much as possible the present state of his beloved country.

The Shambles

This is one of those books I wish I hadn't read on my kindle.  There are lots of wonderful photos, as befits a travelogue, and I'd have loved to have a map of where Pearce is walking.  Was there one?  There must have been, but it would have been too small on the kindle screen to be satisfying.  He starts off visiting cathedrals at Ely and Peterborough and there's another too, all three of which I was not familiar with.  He visits York which made my heart leap up for I was there the summer I was 16, forty years ago, and I still remember the Shambles and the Roman wall.  He goes up to Lindisfarne, a place I would love to visit.  He stops in Wales to visit the capital of second-hand book stores, Hay-on-Wye.  He goes through Oxford and then heads south to Belloc land finally ending at Walsingham. I am skipping a lot here. All of it was captivating.  Along the way, Pearce weaves poetry into his retelling of his great walk (with some train rides!), mostly Gerard Manley Hopkins, but also Wordsworth, other poets and Belloc, of course.

The Holy Island of Lindisfarne

I'd like to buy this book in hardback, reread it and then make it a basis for my own pilgrimage.  The whole time I was reading it, I was seized with the strongest desire to drop everything and go!

You could read this book in one longish sitting.  It is not a lengthy book, but it is a deep one, full of exuberance and pondering, prayer and grief, word play and poetry.  And ale.  Pearce knows the best inns for good ale.

While I was reading this book, I couldn't help but contrast it in my mind with my previous read, The Blueberry Years.  That book too was a memoir and that author also tried to find something religious and soul satisfying in what he was attempting, but that book rang hollow for me.  It seemed like an artifice put on after the fact.  Here, Pearce's focus truly is of a religious nature and his whole pilgrimage is one long prayer.  He isn't trying to make a god out of something (like farming blueberries).   The pilgrim is trying to see everything in a holy relationship with God.  Both authors have an agrarian spirit, but one rings true and the other doesn't.

Two thumbs up.  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.