Cat's Pilgrimage

Fourteen-year-old Cathreen has a crucial choice: follow the path that has taken her to a lake at a deserted scout camp where a girl is bullied and left to drown; or retreat to the dull existence she led with her mother in a small Vancouver Island town. But long before Cathreen, there is the story of the three lost stones fallen from Lucifer’s crown—a story in which her father’s family in Glastonbury has played its part. When Cathreen refuses to choose and flees instead to England to find her father, she steps across a boundary into a landscape where good and evil, justice, vengeance and enduring love vie for prime place in the human heart.

The Utopian community of Summerwood, where she finds refuge, inhabits a strange ground. It is a place where contemporary events brush up against mythology, a land populated by a rag-tag collection of lost souls who slowly reveal themselves to be players in a stark and mysterious drama. Watching over them all is Cutthroat, the cat, whose own attempt to find happiness is the engine that drives their collective destiny.

Cats Pilgrimage, German edition. Published December, 2006

In Cat’s Pilgrimage, Marilyn Bowering has created a mysterious, vividly imagined world in which we willingly abandon the usual distinctions of the ordinary and the extraordinary and find ourselves engaged in an archetypal exploration of our human capacity for cruelty and evil. Marilyn Bowering has mastered a timeless sort of storytelling that is as gripping as it is poetic. The result is a highly original and deftly crafted novel that owes as much to Dickens as it does to fairy tales. It’s not easy to explain how a writer can create a world in which the appearance of a bog man is in no way difficult to fathom, or in which a cat, a dog and a donkey try to influence human affairs because of a broken heart, but Marilyn Bowering manages to straddle the mythic and human worlds in this novel to tremendous advantage. This is a genre-busting work of literature that showcases a mightily impressive intelligence and an utterly original imagination.

"Cat’s Pilgrimage, the new novel from B.C. writer Marilyn Bowering, is a thing of beauty, a rich act of the imagination that alternately dazzles, puzzles and thrills. To read it, her first novel since her Orange Prize shortlisted bestseller Visible Worlds, is to be reminded both of the sheer power of fiction, and of just how pedestrian so much of contemporary fiction has become... In Cat’s Pilgrimage, as in the best magic realism, anything can happen and does. Nothing is off limits to Bowering’s imagination. It’s a delicate balancing act, to successfully root the fantastic in the pedestrian, and Bowering succeeds marvelously."
— Robert J. Wiersema, Ottawa Citizen

"Bowering is a writer of immense muscle and elegance. She’s extremely adept at climbing inside the mind of her teen protagonist. More young adult fiction should read this honestly... Bowering... writes of violence and things repugnant as vividly as she renders beautiful landscapes and tender emotions."
— Marnie Woodrow, National Post

The World of Cat’s Pilgrimage:

The Glastonbury Zodiac:

http://www.labyrinthina.com/zodiac.htm
http://www.occultopedia.com/g/glastonbury_zodiac.htm
http://www.earthrod.co.uk/glaston.html