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Battered Soles
By Paul Nicholas Mason
Turnstone Press, 2005. 185 pages.
Readers will have to pardon me if I tend to gush about Battered Soles, a novel by award-winning Canadian playwright Paul Nicholas Mason. Many times as I was reading this novel I found myself smiling, laughing, and even getting a little teary-eyed. When I had to put it down (in order to, say, do the job I get paid for) I did so grudgingly, and as the time approached that I would be able to open it up again I felt my mood lighten in anticipation. But I’ll try not to gush, lest a gushing review discourage readers from giving Mason’s book a go. Give it a go.
Battered Soles recounts a weekend in the life of one Paul Mason, who has decided to take the 20-kilometer pilgrimage from the Peterborough, Ontario home of the late lesbian artist and now burgeoning cult figure Daz Tourbin to St. John’s Church (Anglican) in Lakefield, home of a Tourbin sculpture of a blue-skinned Jesus, which seems to have taken on miraculous powers since Tourbin’s death, in 1996, in a bicycling accident. The path of the pilgrimage is that taken by the cycling Tourbin from home to the church, largely by way of the Rotary Greenway Trail, which parallels the Otanabee River.
Many things about this story line resonate with me and, perhaps, make me willingly susceptible to its charms. For one thing, a pilgrimage of 20 kilometers sounds like just the right distance. For another, the title pun called immediately to mind the line “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered” from Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” a song that has never ceased to fascinate me through three decades of singing it in the car. In addition, I share with the narrator Paul Mason (and presumably with the author Paul Nicholas Mason) a generational identity, a portly build, a low-key disposition, a healthy distrust of religious institutions, and an equally healthy respect for “racial tolerance and the marvels of multiculturalism.”
Though he is taking the pilgrimage on his own, Mason falls in, in true Canterbury Tales fashion, with unlikely pilgrim companions. Ernie is a hefty fellow from Kitchener who drives limousine for an escort service and is no shrinking violet when it comes to speaking his mind, often to Paul’s dismay and embarrassment. Mason makes it easy to visualize the pair: they are “not the sort of men that people are going to photograph and post up on their walls, except perhaps as models of male-pattern baldness and the dangers of spreading girths.” His second companion, Doug, by contrast, is a Catholic who channels the Blessed Virgin Mary, raising eyebrows on Mason’s part and much outspoken skepticism from Ernie.
The three men follow the trail and visit several of the twenty shrines that have cropped up in homes along the way. The shrines vary from the ridiculous to the sublime and provide some of the many odd but enlightening encounters to be had along the way. Other such encounters include one with a brave Muslim, post-9/11, offering free lemonade to pilgrims and asking for their prayers, and another with a Hindu family bathing, Ganges style, in the Otanabee. Mason, a polite and reserved observer and participant in these episodes, relates them in pitch perfect style. He is humorous and warm-hearted but does not cross the line into either ridicule or sentimentality.
Mason’s pilgrimage is a time for looking back, forward, and at his present state of life, mind, and spirit. His introspection covers both personal and larger-scale concerns:
I was getting hungry, too, and Doug looked as though he wouldn’t be averse to some honey and locusts, but we were out of luck for the moment. In the absence of food, then, we began to swap stories about our respective high schools—I don’t remember precisely how we got started. I’ve found, though, that when men of a certain age begin to talk about things that matter to them, the subject of their high school education often does come up. Is it, I wonder, because so many of us still carry scars of one kind or another from those years? Or is it because that was the time in our lives when the world still seemed ripe with promise and potential? And are those possibilities necessarily exclusive? Twenty-eight years ago, trying to escape a gang of ferret-faced thugs, I consoled myself with the dream that, at forty-five, I’d have a Nobel Prize. Now, a lifetime later, I’m big and strong enough to stare down a good many thugs (though one at a time, preferably), and I’d be made quite cheerful by a nice review in the local paper.
On the larger scale, Mason views past, present, and future through a lens such as one might find in a remake of Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart:
What a weird time the 1970s were in Ontario: I don’t have fond memories of the youth culture of that decade. It seems to me to have been imbued with violence, heavy with threat. It’s as though whatever was creative in the unrest of the 1960s had soured and curdled, leaving just the habit of disrespect and rebellion. . . .
And if many of us have become seekers in our middle years, I suspect it’s partly because the gods we looked to then failed so dismally, just as the gods of communism had failed an earlier generation. We want to think that our lives have meaning and purpose and significance, and for many of us, no matter how impoverished our religious training may have been, that requires a search for spiritual nourishment, for transcendence, for divinity. And that is why this afternoon of Saturday July 12 found Ernie, Doug and me on the trail to St. John’s in Lakefield.
Through the stories he tells, the memories he shares and reflects on, and the picture he offers of the quirky and vibrant community that has grown up around Daz Tourbin’s odd statue, Mason draws us into a vision of something like the Kingdom of God. He terms his pilgrimage experience as a “foretaste of heaven,” but it is an earthy foretaste, with jugglers and strawberry-rhubarb pies and hip-hop poets and bluegrass pickers and members of many religions and holders of many points of view. Heaven as a festival at the end of 20-kilometer walk: Now, there’s a future, and a present, to pray for.
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