The Pilgrim's Progress
1678
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The story
Bunyan's allegory uses the everyday world of common experience as a metaphor for the spiritual journey of the soul toward God. The hero, Christian, encounters many obstacles in his quest: the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Wicket Gate, as well as those who tempt him from his path (e.g., Talkative, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, the Giant Despair). But in the end he reaches Beulah Land, where he awaits the crossing of the river of death and his entry into the heavenly city. "Pilgrim's Progress" was enormously influential not only as a best-selling inspirational tract in the late 17th century, but as an ancestor of the 18th-century English novel, and many of its themes and ideas have entered permanently into Western culture.
What it’s like
Plain, rhythmic seventeenth-century English carries this book, with a dreamer's voice that keeps slipping into direct address to the reader, so it reads like being told a story at a kitchen table by someone who half-believes it. Its landscapes are allegorical and bare: a narrow road, a muddy slough, a dark valley with pits at its edges, a fair crowded with stalls and noise. Imagery is concrete and homely, with burdens on backs, lanterns, gates and keys, and the book moves in short episodes, each one a little stage with a new companion or a new threat. Fear arrives in long, slow stretches of dread rather than gore, and the one harrowing scene of a trial and execution is told with restraint. The tone is earnest, sincere and often tender, with a steady undercurrent of hope and a warm, low-key humour in the sketches of tempters and fools. It suits a quiet Sunday afternoon, a slow read before bed, or a comfort reread for anyone drawn to old-fashioned storytelling and the pull of a pilgrimage. It is for readers who enjoy moral parable, plain-spoken sincerity, and the slow, dreamlike logic of an allegory that trusts its own images.
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