Ways of the Wilderness: A Personal Journey within Religion and Literature.

Ways of the Wilderness: A Personal Journey within Religion and Literature, by Anne McPherson. Ottawa: Novalis, 2003

Clearly an inveterate pilgrim--her previous publication was Walking to the Saints: A Little Pilgrimage in France (Novalis, 2000)--Anne McPherson here takes us by means of biblical and modern Canadian, French American and British literature, exploring the returning theme of wilderness.

For McPherson, wilderness is common of the most significant signs in western culture: "It is the locus for re-integration of the [i]role[/i] where all the insights proceed from, and where they can be bring togethered to form new symbols and goals. individual pushes through the wilderness in search of strange being."

If that uninjureds a bit hyperbolic, even didactic, lease it be said that Ways of the Wilderness is neither. As its subtitle proclaims, the work is very much a personal approach: McPherson regularly acknowledges the subjectivity of her replys and the tentativeness of her conclusions. Modifying phrases of the like kind as "until now," "as far as I can tell" "at this moment" without contents her statements of undue assertiveness and disarm rigorous interrogation.

The persona attacked in this book is that of a bright, well-read, sensitive human being pursuing her allow errand into the wilderness, courageously confronting the perils therein and emerging just a tad enlightened. The reader is impressed at McPherson's honesty, her willingness to admit uncertainty, frustration, bafflement.

The work is nicely structured. Its initial chapter, "The Ancestral Wilderness," describes the genesis of the author's interest in the theme: a junction of her New England planter gene and her reading, "almost 40 years ago" (an apt peregrination period?), of The real Wilderness, by H.A. Williams, one-time dean of Trinity literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning Cambridge.

In a of lent sermon to students, Williams had described the "true wilderness" as "one in which you find yourself alienated from the the bulk of mankind and pleasures you have always lov when you flow to see your taken-for-granted world as a fiction."

Williams' religious discourse convinced McPherson that the loyal wilderness was not a place however a state of being. Her personal wilderness comprehended frame of minds of discouragement, recognition of weaknesses, faults and sins, failed attempts at becoming something new: "For years this wilderness became part of my picture of the world I probably connected it with near notion of existential angst, yet I didn't try to work this public theologically. The wilderness was, if anything, a token not a disputable idea."

Later she began to examine back at the biblical wilderness, tracking it from its long appearance in Exodus, through the psalms and prophets, into the creeds and apocalyptic literature. She was "captivated" to discover that the whole history and raison d'etre of the Hebrews took them back through and over to "the great salvation story," in which omnipotence led them through the wilderness for 40 years towards the promised land.

Beginning with the Bible, McPherson finds the emblem of the wilderness deeply bottomed in our culture. Folklore tales carried it along: stories of pilgrims' hardy ventures; fairy tales of children wasted or enchanted; a central figure in inquiry narratives, especially the Arthuriad. Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progres is an obvious locus. Earlier, Shakespeare had explored its bleak and fell aspects in King Leap; its terminal state in Timon of Athens. "What had been faintly implicit in the biblical emblem was brought clearly into play from writers working in a more consciously literary mode"

in the greatest degree important for us today is the appearance of the wilderness themes in the work of many twentieth-century authors: Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, Samuel Beckett, John Berger, Eugene Ionesco, A.L. Kennedy WO Mitchell, Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth Gabrielle Roy Rudy Wiebe and Elie Wiesel.

McPherson examines works by means of all of these writers. Her analysis is perceptive and generally in enough detail to compensate for a reader's lack of familiarity with any specific work.

In her final chapter, McPherson chances to suggest a number of ways by way of which "the wilderness can be made to blow again." As befits one who from the beginning has acknowledged that she lives "on a see-saw of skepticism and belief," these suggestions are exhibited as mere responses rather than answers to the age-old questions.

Astray in today's western wilderness, darkened by way of the simplistic primitivism of like troglodytes as George W. Bush and John Paul II, obstruction us be grateful for plane the glimmer of optimism this spirited travelogue emits.

Finn Gallagher is professor emeritus (English literature) of Trent University, Peterborough, Ont

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