This was my first book from this author, and as soon as I started reading I was reminded of The Canterbury Tales to which this book is similar. I did enjoy it overall however some of the characters voices were better than others although they all had a similar vein of what have I really done wrong, and a great deal of self centred belief. Overall a good book.

On the road to Rome

Matthew Kneale’s Pilgrims is a thoroughly entertaining novel, witty and humorous with a seasoning of pathos and genuine sadness.

A disparate group of medieval pilgrims make their way across England and Europe on the well-trodden pilgrim route to Rome. All the pilgrims have their back stories; almost all are religious, or at least superstitious; all are flawed individuals, some more sinful (or simply human) than others – a mixture of the piously gullible and piously fraudulent. There is a large cast of characters and this is part of the novel’s charm – perhaps the nearest to a central character is Tom son of Tom, a sort of holy innocent with no money, who wishes to pray in Rome for his dead cat to be released from Purgatory. Put upon and exploited by others, Tom’s essential goodness and honesty win through in the end and he proves himself a lot more clever than he or anyone else might have imagined.

There is a strong element of Canterbury Tales here, with much bawdy humour and some familiar personalities, for example the beautiful Lucy de Bourne who has survived a number of inadequate husbands. There are, too, contemporary references which anyone who has been on a modern package tour and been forced to mix with fellow travellers will recognise and smile at. Finally, there is also a more serious element – a world rife with anti-Semitism and prejudice – for although the ending is a happy one for most, there is also reminder that it cannot be for everyone.

Matthew Kneale is the son of Nigel Kneale and Judith Kerr; quite a pedigree, to have Quatermass and Mog as siblings, but not something I knew when I read his English Passengers years back. And despite enjoying that greatly, I've not read anything of his since, until this – which could almost be called English Passengers too – popped up on Netgalley. The setting is again historical, but this time further back, not the 19th century but the 13th. The characters, a group of pilgrims en route to Rome. As with any story which gathers a group of people from one country, but of various different social strata, into a bubble, it's hard not to take it as a state of the nation metaphor, particularly when you consider characters like Hugh, the wealthy stirrer, or Sir John, the minor noble who's always keenly alert to a slight, and tends to lose the fights this causes him to pick (a character I could only ever picture as being played by the arsehole brother from Flowers, who does these types so well). After all, it can hardly be chance that Kneale opens with a pogrom by way of prologue, and then the relay race storytelling of the novel proper begins with Simple Tom, who fears for the soul of his cat, and who sets out from near Witney – consituency of another foolish fellow famous for being unusually close to an animal, who got us into this poke in the first place. Because what English state-of-the-nation story coming out now could be other than a Brexit story, even if Brexit is at present obscured by a different eschaton which it itself helped to immanentise? Hence resonant details like the powers that be raking in the money, while offloading the resentment thus generated on to a hapless, easily victimised minority, or all that suspicion some of the pilgrims bear towards foreign food. Set against which, how often they get food poisoning in the English segments – exactly the sort of liberation we can all look forward to once we're free of that onerous EU red tape.

This might make the whole project sound forced, which isn't my intention; it's more just how I read, especially in times of trial. None of the parallels clang, in the way they can do in the sort of historical fiction that really pisses me off, or the deliberately heavy-handed (and often very funny) way it's done in a comedy like Upstart Crow. It's more a case of, in Barbara Tuchman's phrase, a distant mirror. See equally all those lines which feel like they echo lockdown, even though the book can't have been written with that in mind, like one character remembering the moment each day when "my eyes would open and I'd remember, almost like it was something new, that the sun had fallen and my world had died". Or "For a moment the devil taunted us with hope". Most poignant of all, the bit right at the end when one of the characters, returned to their home at last, experiences the strangeness of seeing for the first time in so long something which used to be part of their everyday life. Something I hope and pray we all get to experience for ourselves before too many more seasons pass. But even if some things remain true throughout history – from acquaintances bent on misguided matchmaking, to "rich folk's justice is a penny to pay, poor folk's justice is dangling from a rope" – not everything does. There's a fine art to putting a character with a modern condition in a historical novel, never using the word which didn't exist yet, and making it recognisable to modern readers without it feeling anachronistic. It can be done, of course it can, as witness Patrick O'Brian's typically deft work with the autistic supporting character in the Aubrey/Maturin series, but not everything has manifested the same way in very different worlds through history, and I did find myself squinting a little at some overly modern versions of depression which various characters suffer, let alone one late reveal which I'm going to put in a footnote*. All of this contributes to a general sense that these aren't quite mediaeval people, so much as modern people engaged in a low-key LARP against the background of a mediaeval painting. Possibly it's because I'm coming to this not long after reading a Hilary Mantel and a Marguerite Yourcenar, who in their different ways both genuinely feel like guides to an alien age. Which, after all, is a very high bar to clear. But equally, there's Kneale's readiness to do things like have a character based on Margery Kempe, a century early. Now, on one hand she can be quite funny, and there's definitely material in taking a look at a saint's life from a modern viewpoint, and considering how incredibly annoying many of them must have been to know. But equally, you can't just shuffle someone back a century and expect them to be basically the same person, any more than you can put Wilfred Owen at Waterloo, or the cast of Love Island at the Somme, or Judge Dredd in a modern American police department. Actually, maybe scratch that last one.

On top of that, there's the frequent problem of books with multiple narrators, wherein some are much better company than others. Tom, who gets the most turns, is genial enough; the noble lady whose husbands keep dying and it's definitely not her fault, well, mostly not, is entertaining enough; and some of the worst of them we only ever see from outside. One late and temporary addition to the party is perhaps my favourite of the lot. But equally, the timeslipped Kempe, who could have been hilarious in a smaller dose, goes on for too long and became near as irksome to me as she is to the other pilgrims. Between which, and the rather pat picaresque justice of the finale, it's certainly not a novel about which I can enthuse in the way I did English Passengers.

*SPOILER: I'm not saying it's impossible that a continental Jewish physician in the 13th century might identify a child's occasional seizures as being down to gluten intolerance, rather than divine punishment for his mother's lechery. But Kneale needed to sell it a lot better to make it feel like other than an intrusion of the modern middle class mindset.

It was a fascinating readI loved, engrossing and entertaining.
The quirky cast of characters is fascinating and they are fleshed out, the historical background is well researched and vivid, the story is well plotted and flows.
It was an excellent read, highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

In Pilgrims, an assortment of medieval characters set off to Rome. They come from a range of backgrounds and have wildly different motivations. They also have varying degrees of guile and gullibility, which is communicated through their first-person narrations. There are two Jewish women, trying to pass as Christians as they fear for their lives, a man who mourns his dead cat, a professional pilgrim who travels on behalf of others too busy to make the journey themselves, a woman who just wants the pilgrim’s badge so she can show she’s been, and so on.

Aside from their personal motivations, the different political and social philosophies of the group are highlighted. There are those who respect the authority of church and state, and those who believe they can commune directly with their god without the corrupt clergy. They come together for a series of misadventures and misunderstandings, with a Chaucer-like mix of bawdiness, conflict and social comedy.

Both the period and the premise appealed and I really wanted to love Pilgrims, but it somehow didn’t spark for me. After a promising start it lacked pace and energy. It was neither dramatic enough nor funny enough and I found my eyes racing ahead trying to get to the good bits.

The structure was part of the problem. Each new character tells their story to the reader (not the other travellers) giving their backstory, their reasons for going on pilgrimage. I expected that once the introductions were over, we would get into the story and their adventures. However, new characters kept being introduced and the process repeated.

This meant that rather than being engrossed in the progress of the pilgrimage, we were thrown back into some new backstories of some people we didn’t much care about. Then we got the new characters’ perceptions of the existing characters, who we already know well and have formed our own opinion about.

For me, this all overshadowed the journey itself. I didn’t feel either the hardships or the excitement of the journey. Some of the pilgrims were experienced travellers but others had barely left their own village before and I didn’t feel the complete sense of dislocation they must have experienced.

While Pilgrims does offer a sense of the period, for me it was not an absorbing story and I felt like I’d had to cross the Alps on foot to reach my destination.

Pilgrims follows a diverse cast of characters on a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s in Rome in 1289. Some are hoping for absolution of sins (most of the cardinal sins get a tick) while others have different reasons for making the journey. A noblewoman is looking to obtain a divorce from her husband and remarry, a woman and a girl are both driven to Rome claiming God and Jesus speak to them directly, a young serf fears his cat is languishing in purgatory and wishes to save its soul while another man makes a living out of going on pilgrimages for those unable to do so themselves. Most of these people have never been far from their place of birth and, setting off quite late in the season, they meet and join forces along the route, hoping for strength in numbers on a long and arduous journey.

Different characters pick up the story along the way, giving some of their backstory and developing relationships with other pilgrims. They squabble, sometimes show kindness to each other, eat strange foods in France and Italy, get snowed in in Switzerland and eventually make it to Rome. The characters are vivid and memorable and the narrative compelling.

Pilgrims was a very enjoyable, refreshing read. Highly entertaining at times, while also highlighting xenophobia of medieval England and inequality between the sexes, between rich and poor. Wonderfully researched, I find it fascinating just how integral religion was to medieval lives and I also loved learning that Kneale based some of his characters on real people. I’m very much looking forward to reading his non-fiction book on Rome, which I’ve had for a while but not gotten around to.

Highly recommended. My thanks to Atlantic Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read Pilgrims.

*Many thanks to Matthew Kneale, Atlantic Books and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
It is 1289 and the idea of pilgrimage as a form of seekeing pardon for sins or asking for grace is in full bloom. A group consisting of pilgrims of all different walks of life decide to undertake the terrific effort to walk all the way from England and Wales to Rome. Different social status, different age, different reasons behind the pilgrimage, but one aim: to pray in Rome and to seek ways that might solve their problems.
We meet each pilgrim, learn about their life, their troubles, their secrets. There are funny moments and there are moments that show the dark nature of human beings.
I found this novel truly enteraining thanks to the plethora of characters and their stories. I believe Geoffrey Chaucer would approve of them. The tales take place one hundred years before The Canterbury Tales but the ideas behind the pilgrimage are the same. Author did a terrific research and the pilgrimage is wonderfully depicted, starting with preparations for the journey, dangers that awaited the travellers, places where they mainly stayed at (so-called hospitals) and the physical obstacles they encountered. I think I recognized some pilgrims from medieval Pomerania thanks to what they were planning to smuggle without paying taxes. And I learnt where the word 'breakfast' derives from.
Mr Kneale wrote a book that was an entertaining read for me and now I feel the need to read Chaucer's Tales, albeit in fragments.

I always enjoy Matthew Kneale’s historical fiction and this is no exception. We join a pilgrimage from England to Rome in the late 13th century. Individual pilgrims relate their back stories and take us through a section of the journey. These range from Tom, Son of Tom (a simpleton) to Matilda Froome (a religious hysteric) to Lady Lucy, a nymphomaniac from Lincolnshire. There were many laugh out loud moments - reader alert: sense of humour is a very particular thing so I’m not suggesting everyone will find it as funny as I did - interspersed with fascinating historical detail about pilgrimages and a reminder of the abysmal treatment meted out to Jews in England and throughout Europe in medieval times. Very nearly a 5 star read for me.

With thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Books for a very enjoyable review copy.

I really enjoyed this book. It read like a quirky take on The Canterbury Tales. I think Chaucer would have approved of the variety of characters all going to Rome for different reasons. I highly recommend it.