The Pilgrimage

Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael’s increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into disarray when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.

Banned in Ireland on its first publication in 1961, Broderick’s debut arrived “like an incendiary device” (Sunday Independent). The Pilgrimage anticipated the deep shifts that would soon turn the country’s theocratic society upside down. It is a darkly comic, blasphemous, and sexually charged chamber drama laying bare the hypocrisies of a small Irish town “as watchful as the jungle,” and teetering on the brink of catastrophe. In the words of Colm Tóibín, in his foreword to this edition, The Pilgrimage “cleared a space in the jungle so that its wildness could be more easily seen.”

“Had The Pilgrimage been freely available in 1961 . . . [it] would have filled a silence about  homosexuality that was almost total . . . What Broderick is attempting is a French novel set in an Irish town; he wishes to put dangerous liaisons into the Irish midlands, to allow his Irish characters the freedom to pray to God for their eternal souls and then get into a state of mortal sin with agility and ease.”

—Colm Tóibín, Arts Council of Ireland Laureate Blog

“A masterly piece of work . . . Ironic, sarcastic like Swift and Shaw, sentimental like The Playboy of the Western World . . . [Broderick] wrote with great simplicity, his pitiless eye stripping his characters bare and then letting the story clothe them.”

—Julien Green

“A taut stylish book that surely read like an incendiary device at the time . . . Broderick’s tightly controlled style is awash with the sharp humour of recognition. He exposes Catholicism but has no need to mock it. People go through empty rituals of observance and lead utterly secular and selfish lives, but it doesn’t mean God isn’t watching. With The Pilgrimage, Athlone found its Balzac . . . a man unafraid to confront taboos at a time when others felt it wiser to keep their heads down.”

—Dermot Bolger, The Sunday Independent (Dublin)

“The Athlone writer John Broderick is never celebrated in Ireland to the extent that his literary talents deserve . . . [his] first novel, The Pilgrimage, published in 1961, was promptly banned by the Censorship of Publications Board . . . Whatever the reason, the novel certainly seems to have struck a dissonant chord. Its publication came one year after Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls and four years before John McGahern’s The Dark suffered a similar fate . . . These novels presented a dangerous cocktail of promiscuity, burgeoning female sexuality and masturbation that elements within Irish society were not prepared to face up to in the 1960s.”

—Eamon Maher, The Irish Times

“A fugitive from a superior civilization, struggling to survive in a meretricious wasteland . . . [Broderick’s] savage satire conceals the frustration and anguish of a disillusioned romantic.”

—Patrick Murray, Éire-Ireland

“A Belfast reviewer called John Broderick’s  [The Pilgrimage] ‘the most accurately-observed Irish novel I have read in years.’ Perhaps it is worth adding that his books are banned in the Free State of Eire, where he was born. With such credentials as these, an American reviewer must accept the sting of Broderick’s picture, and can only conclude that Ireland is still . . .  the most distressful country the world has ever seen—and the least changed, for all her apparent political alterations.”

—William A. P. White, The New York Times 

“[Broderick’s] osmotic sense of his country has made his writing barometric and few have written so well about the Town, that oddly Irish settlement in which nearly half our people live. By ‘barometric’ I mean that one could take a reading from his novels of the state of the country, the real but hidden forces at work . . . The Pilgrimage [is] about public piety and the dark secrets concealed by the peaceful facades of houses in respectable towns in good Catholic Ireland.”

—Sean McMahon, The Irish Independent

John Broderick (1924–1989) was born in Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland and died in Bath, England. He worked as a journalist and was author of numerous novels including An Apology for Roses (1973), The Pride of Summer (1976), London Irish (1979) and The Trial of Father Dillingham (1982).

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

The Pilgrimage • Paperback ISBN: 9781946022950

Mar 4, 2025 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 37

5" x 8.5" • 224 pages • $19.00

eBook ISBN: 9781946022967