Pilgrims Way

Daud, a young man from an unnamed East African island, lives alone in a decaying rented house in a cathedral town in southern England, working as a theatre orderly at a local hospital. The novel follows him through a single summer as he contends with loneliness, racism, and the buried trauma of his past while falling in love with an English student nurse.

From the opening pages, Daud's isolation is palpable. He sits alone in a pub nursing a cheap half-pint, reflecting on the hostility he has encountered since arriving in England: refused service at one pub, denied food at another, asked to leave a third by a landlady who feared her husband would attack him. Walking home past the cathedral, he notes that although he has lived in the town for years, he has never been inside the building, though skinheads have chased him through its cloisters. His rented house is damp and rotting. He turns on the television to mask the silence and thinks of letters he owes people at home, but letters from old friends are full of naive optimism about England that bears no resemblance to his reality.

At the hospital, Daud cleans theatres, scrubs instruments, and occasionally assists surgeons. His supervisor, Mr. Solomon, the Theatre Superintendent, is unwaveringly hard on him. One afternoon, Daud first notices Student Nurse Catherine Mason, whose beauty makes his chest ache. Their first real conversation happens during a night shift when they are left alone for hours while the senior Sister, or ward nurse, sleeps. Daud has told the Sister that Catherine's father is a Colonel in the Coldstream Guards, a British Army regiment. Catherine finds this fabrication amusing: Her father is actually a solicitor and a former conscientious objector. She tells Daud she became a nurse partly by default, afraid to pursue music, and hints at a complicated dynamic with her brother Richard, a solicitor in London.

Daud's two closest companions are Karta and Lloyd, whose mutual hatred forms a volatile triangle. Karta, a postgraduate student from Sierra Leone, arrived in England full of jokes but has grown increasingly bitter. His father named him Carter after a white senior partner; Karta changed his name in an act of cultural reclamation. Lloyd, the son of a local footwear business owner, is large and ungainly. He provokes Karta with racist jokes while Karta responds with withering lectures about slavery and colonial theft. Daud refuses to take sides, though he suspects Lloyd is genuinely racist beneath his joking. Lloyd visits several evenings a week, always bringing bags of food.

After weeks of failed attempts, Daud asks Catherine to dinner and she accepts. Over a Chinese meal, he reveals the truth he has been hiding: He failed all his university exams. He describes going hungry, being laughed at when his stomach rumbled in class, and stealing chocolate from shops. When the money his father sent ran out, his father replied that there was no more, "unless I wanted to go back and drink his blood." Catherine presses him to explain why he did not seek help; he admits he simply did not know how. Despite the tension, the evening ends well, and he kisses her at her door.

Their relationship deepens, punctuated by encounters with casual racism. Two men on a bridge taunt Daud, and Catherine tells them to piss off with contempt that briefly shakes them. A group of youths on a dark street calls him "nigger" and asks how much he paid for her. An old man in a pub assures them he has "nothing against you darkies" before recounting his imperial adventures. When Catherine first visits Daud's house, she is horrified by the squalor and scrubs the kitchen. That night they make love for the first time.

A letter from Karim, an old friend, unlocks the central wound of Daud's past. Among chatty news, Karim mentions that Amina, the sister of "Marehemu Rashid," is now a prostitute. Marehemu is a term of respect for the dead, and seeing it before Rashid's name strikes Daud like a blow. Rashid, whom Daud called Bossy, was his closest friend: a champion swimmer, fair-skinned and handsome, recognizable by a silver-strapped wristwatch. One December morning when they were both 17, Rashid suggested they borrow a boat and sail to a nearby island. They spent the day exploring ruins and swimming. As they prepared to sail home, Rashid jumped overboard to race the boat back. A sudden squall filled the sail and carried Daud away. He called for Rashid but could not turn around. By the time he reached land after dark, the revolution had begun.

Daud was beaten by men who told him the day of reckoning for all Arabs had come. He was captured, accused of being a soldier, and left senseless. He was forced to watch two armed men rape a teenage Indian girl after beating her mother with a rifle butt. Detained with his family for days, he later searched for Rashid, but the body was never found. Daud tells Catherine this story over several nights, weeping as she holds him. He describes the forged passport, the terror of fleeing through the airport, his parents whispering behind the front door as he left. He does not think he will ever see them again.

Catherine reveals she has been seeing a boyfriend named Malcolm. When she tells Malcolm about Daud, he is devastated, proposing marriage and calling Daud racist names. She breaks with Malcolm and moves into Daud's house. When she first told her mother about Daud, her mother called her disgusting. Catherine was wounded less by the expected racism than by the contempt her mother revealed for her.

The tension between Karta and Lloyd reaches its breaking point when Karta slaps Lloyd during an argument. Lloyd grabs a copper pipe and unleashes a torrent of racist abuse. Karta snatches the pipe and beats Lloyd savagely. Daud intervenes only when he fears Karta will kill Lloyd. During a later visit to Lloyd's parents for Sunday tea, Lloyd's mother reveals that Lloyd is joining the Army. Daud tells him not to get hurt. At Karta's farewell party before his return to Sierra Leone, Catherine endures unwanted advances, and Karta holds Daud in a long embrace as they say goodbye.

Walking home from the party, Daud enters a churchyard to read headstones. Six young men emerge from the shadows and beat him unconscious. Catherine picks up a stone to defend him but is punched and kicked. Daud wakes with a broken arm, leaning against a headstone and smiling.

Recovering at home, Daud writes a letter to his father full of apologies and walks immediately to the post office to mail it. On Saturday he asks Catherine to take him inside the cathedral for the first time. Standing in the nave, looking up at the vaulted ceiling, he is overwhelmed. He tells her the building was made not for God but to celebrate human ingenuity, and that his own journey is "part of the same dubious struggle of the human psyche to break out of its neurosis and fears." When he has rested, he promises, he will release the full force of his spirit on an unsuspecting world.