In our increasingly secular times, people may have stopped going to church, yet growing numbers are embracing another religious tradition: the pilgrimage. Guy Stagg quotes a striking statistic. When Spain joined the EU in 1986, fewer than 10 people a year were walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim way of Saint James, towards the city of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Nowadays the annual figure is upwards of quarter of a million.
Why they are doing it is nowhere near as clear as it was 500 years ago. Some like the physical challenge, or the away-from-it-all life of basic, roadside pilgrim hostels and making-do out of a rucksack. Others enjoy the companionship of a shared adventure with strangers. For some of the band of celebs who walked the Camino recently for a BBC documentary series, the draw seemed to be airtime and the chance to have a pop at religion.
Stagg, though, offers a more nuanced, thought-provoking and hard-earned perspective. He chooses a different pilgrim trail, the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome, no less ancient, but nowadays less trodden. And then he adds to it by heading onwards via Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon to Jerusalem, the city sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, altogether a total of 5,500 kilometres and 10 months on the road.
As a nonbeliever, his initial impetus was, he admits, pretty hazy. Prior to setting out at the start of 2013, he had at 23 had a nervous breakdown, and tried to take his own life. Doctors and therapists had subsequently got him halfway back when, as a way of “wandering out of my life”, he tried the London to Canterbury route once taken by Chaucer’s pilgrims.
There is, he is clear, no road-to-Damascus experience en route, simply a hard-to-define instinct that it has done something beneficial for him. And so he decided to head for Jerusalem on foot. “That time of unhappy confusion was over, but I was not better,” he writes. “Or rather I was better, yet less, much less, than I had once been. Brittle now, and hollow too, and knocked down by the slightest of blows. I thought the journey might build me up again. I walked to mend myself. But this reason I was ashamed to admit.”
The Crossway is in many ways classic travelogue, so classic indeed that, given the latter stages of its route, early admirers (it was shortlisted for the Deborah Rogers Foundation award) have drawn parallels with Patrick Leigh Fermor. Stagg certainly has a way with words – he likens hillsides of wires from an abandoned vineyard, covered in snow, to scattered sheets of music; or the noise of air displaced by the blades of a wind turbine to the cry of geese. And there is something visceral as he recalls his panic attack when in St Peter’s Square in Rome, in the middle of thousands of pilgrims at a papal mass, as “fat colours, blunt noises, swells of confused movement”.
But in addition – and unlike the rather stiff-upper-lipped Leigh Fermor – Stagg allows an emotional honesty to filter through the golden prose, a willingness to lay himself bare in front of his readers as he is struggling psychologically to understand himself at the same time as struggling physically to put one foot in front of the other.
Intriguingly, this is a chronicle of a world that is imagined by many in our sceptical age to have already disappeared. Stagg describes, one after another, those believers who give him shelter at the end of a day’s walking, whether in the monasteries, chapels, convents and church halls that still line this pilgrim route, or in family homes when he arrives in villages where there is nowhere else to stay. These are the most compelling sections of what is a luminous and occasionally (almost in spite of itself) numinous account.
There are many downsides to organised religion, most well-explored today, but its benefits are too often underplayed. Here, for once, they are laid out by someone who had no wish to make converts, and who is obviously surprised when he encounters that tradition of unconditional hospitality and welcome, or the concern for the lost sheep, and attends rituals (though put under no pressure whatsoever to do so by his hosts) that somehow lift his eyes and mind beyond the self to a bigger purpose.
Whether by nature, training or on account of his fragile emotional state, Stagg soaks it all up and then shares it on the page. Among the most moving and thought-provoking characters he encounters are the two elderly nuns, remnants of a lost cloistered world, who maintain their tiny guest-house next to a prison in France because they want to help those who pass “learn what they believe”. And then there is the young Australian nun, Anna, trying to revive an abandoned Orthodox at Sveta Bogorodica in Macedonia, busy preserving fruit in glass jars and hand-painting eggs for Easter, all the time waiting for something she can’t really articulate.
Rather like Stagg, though he is walking not waiting. The Crossway has no obvious happy ending, but for author and reader alike the road turns out to be more significant than the final destination.
• The Crossway by Guy Stagg (Picador (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
