Decades of teaching Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales to senior English students not only convinced Adelaide poet Valerie Volk that the work is one of the greatest in Western literature, but inspired her to write her own modern version of this “magnificent tapestry of life.”

Chaucer’s pilgrims were journeying to Canterbury, Volk chose Oberammergau and the Passion Play that has been performed there every ten years since 1634 as the goal of her 21st century pilgrims. Chaucer’s characters regaled one another with fictional stories of the day, Volk’s recount their varied individual motivations for being where they find themselves – in a group of 20+ strangers on a four-day bus tour that is to culminate in a religious play that is performed in a vast arena by half the inhabitants of a Bavarian village.

As with Chaucer – and one of the joys of the book is the comedic cunning with which Volk has paired her modern characters with his medieval ones – few of the pilgrims present as the pious souls one might expect to be making the penitential journey. There are three very different men of the cloth: a TV evangelist, a church leader impatiently waiting preferment and a parish priest experiencing a crisis of faith, but there are also among the large cast a cabinet minister with his wife and newly acknowledged teenage son by another woman, a Vietnam veteran, a professional footballer, an ageing Lothario of a pilot, the mousy winner of a cooking contest, and five slightly embarrassed foundry workers paying off an unspoken debt to one of their number.

The prologue, set in 1633, obliquely dramatizes the play’s origins as an offering promised in return for the village’s deliverance from the plague, then Caroline, a journalist researching the story at the behest of her editor/married lover, introduces her busload of pilgrims, sketching the externals, appearances, attitudes, but leaving the details to be revealed by each character’s internal monologue. The bulk of the book is taken up with these often intense individual accounts, so that readers may start to wonder how the performance itself and its effects upon the different characters can all be fitted in, but we are in capable hands: we glimpse the play through the eyes of the last few characters and learn how our pilgrims have responded to their experience – the slight movements of the heart that presage larger, later changes of behaviour – through that entertainingly ubiquitous modern device, the evaluation form, handed out on the bus next day by the capable German tour guide.

The whole saga is in verse, each tale introduced by a stanza in Chaucer’s now barely comprehensible English and the cover, frankly, does the book no favours, but readers should not be put off: the free verse is flexible and beautifully lean, an ideal medium for the pen-portrait and the interior monologue, the Chaucerian language is poetically decoded below each quotation to make the tantalizing link between the ancient and the modern, and the plot, or series of plots – so many well-drawn characters, so many complex lives, so much intriguing venality – is as readable, engaging and cleverly shaped as any good novel.

 Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser (SA Weekend Magazine), 18 January, 2014.

            What are their stories?
            what compulsions bring them here,
            to this small village in the valley
            beneath its towering mountains? (21)

Invoking Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in structure and with a ‘motley crew’ of pilgrims, Volk’s Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales assembles a cross-section of modern society cloaked in secrecy and scepticism. Where Chaucer’s travellers are drawn together by a story-telling competition, Volk’s pilgrims are united by a four-day bus tour to the German town of Oberammergau for the ritual of the Passion Play. Every tenth year, since 1634, Oberammergau has staged this event of epic proportion to honour a plague promise:

             The vows they made to God
             that if he spared their village
             they would offer to him, time on time,
             performance of a passion play,
             a presentation of Christ’s suffering and death. (19)

Volk succeeds in recasting Chaucer’s medieval crew, now ‘a school principal’, ‘a much-married socialite’, and ‘a TV evangelist’. But it isn’t religious devotion that compels these pilgrims, rather a web of guilt and longing that ignites their search for salvation. Each of Volk’s pilgrims has a secret past; a past that forces them to question their future. For Caroline (The narrator), an unrequited romance; for Douglas (The Knight’s Tale), a question of forgiveness from the wife he’s betrayed and the bastard son he’s hidden for 20 years; and for Elinor (The Prioress), uncertainty of thawing a hardened heart.

Pushed by her boss (and bed friend), Caroline journeys to Oberammergau under the guise of a travel feature – a foggy pretence that even her fellow travellers begin to see through as she digs into their motivations for making the trip. With Caroline trawling for stories the Oberammergau cast turn inwards, confessing in a series of dramatic monologues that chart a path from The Knight’s Tale to The Parson’s Tale. These monologues plumb the depths of human experience, though at times narrative pace is given preference over the potential to linger in imagery, as in Elinor’s confession;

            Huge dream-time clouds,
            black and thunderous,
            loom close above us.

             […]

            I reach for her – but this is where the dream         
            Tonight has ended. So still I do not know.
            When I reached out
            Was it to hold?   
            Or did I push? (88 – 89) 

These ‘dream-time clouds’ spark a desire to climb into Elinor’s subconscious, to see her stripped of the façade she hides behind in waking, to trace the fault-lines and frailty that make her human. Yet Volk is careful to not to let her characters or audience wallow in storms of remorse. Instead, fervent questions connect and drive the narrative confessions, offering windows into the complexity of Volk’s modern pilgrims and their journey for answers.

Death also ties Volk’s other cast members to the tour. Through tales of grief and guilt, Francis, the wine merchant, is knotted to Stephen, a scientist who wrongfully accepts a research award following the loss of his colleague. For Luke, the death of his mother means the opportunity to collapse his father’s career, while The Wife of Bath’s stand-in recalls the ghosts of three husbands and the gradual vanishing of her identity with them. These questions of identity serve as reminders of our temporality – reminders that our preoccupation with carefully constructing our selves and our stories will one day disappear. We are reminded that history is only ever in our hands for a moment as Caroline closes

         I am indeed a part
         of all those I have met
         and must learn who I am. (324)

Tamryn Bennett   Cordite Poetry Journal, 9th April, 2014, 9th April, 2014

Valerie Volk,Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales (Wakefield Press, 2013)

It was Newton who said: ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. Something similar could be said by many of the authors who are inspired by writers who have gone before them. Valerie Volk, in her verse novel, may not have seen further than Chaucer, but she has seen him from a different angle and that makes for an interesting and evocative narrative. In doing so, she draws on the richness of Chaucer’s characters and the charm of their stories. But by putting her verse novel into a modern context, she has allowed herself a greater freedom to explore the thoughts and motivation of the pilgrims in a way that will resonate with contemporary readers.

Volk’s pilgrims are not riding to Canterbury, but travelling in a bus to Oberammergau, Germany, for the Passion play that has been staged there every ten years since 1634. Their journey takes four days, which matches the time span in Canterbury Tales – and the characters portrayed by Volk match those in Chaucer’s poem. In case the reader is not familiar with Chaucer, the contents page lists the characters in Passion Play against those in Chaucer, and each section is prefaced by a verse from Chaucer. I wondered if this was necessary, as the characters do stand complete in their own right, but undoubtedly part of the interest of the novel is its reference to the medieval poet. One feature not found in Chaucer is the character of Caroline, a journalist who has joined the pilgrimage in search of a good story for her magazine, while using the time away from her married lover to assess their relationship. Caroline moves the narrative along while allowing us to see the pilgrims through another’s eyes. In the same way, the reader is allowed access to the thoughts of the pilgrims, a privilege not allowed Caroline, nor one allowed by Chaucer.

The Prologue explains the way the tradition of the play came into being with a confession by the man who brought the plague to Oberammergau in 1633, by returning to his wife and family from the village where he had been working in a village where the plague was rampant. The Passion play and the villagers’ promise to repeat it every ten years was their way to placate God and end the plague. The man who had brought the infection to the village found no relief:

I must accept the truth, the truth I have denied

I knew full well what I was doing

When I came back.

It was my choice to come.

The guilt is mine. (11)

The narrative then moves to the twenty-first century, as we meet Caroline, who sets off rather reluctantly to undertake the journey as an journalistic assignment. As the story progresses, we see her changed both by the stories she is hearing from the pilgrims and also by her own reaction to the Passion play, and the story that it enacts.

Few of the pilgrims are motivated by religious fervour, but all are in some way affected by what they see. All have a story to tell, and Caroline makes it her business to ferret out these stories.

It is impossible in this review to outline all the characters but The Wife of Bath, or her alter ego, will give a glimpse:

Yes, marriage can become a habit, just like any other.

And, after all, If anyone should know this,

Surely I’m the one. Four husbands down the track –

Another poised there on the starting blocks –

You must agree that I am qualified

To talk about the state of wedded bliss. (111)

Some readers may feel a little reluctant to begin a verse novel, thinking of it as a very long and difficult poem. Reading Passion Play will dispel that myth. The text moves comfortably and smoothly, falling into place with a natural rhythm. Volk has also succeeded in capturing the voice of each pilgrim with striking individuality. Consider, for example, Josef the Plowman, describing how he had to shoot his animals in a time of drought:

Fair broke her heart – and mine –

That morning I went out and shot the lot

No choice.            

They were half dead of thirst in any case.

And scrawny. No fodder.(202)

Stephen, the Scholar, regards his fellow pilgrims with contempt, while trying to repress his own guilt that he had used another scientist’s work:

But now it haunts me.

I am a thief who shrugs his shoulders,

Justifies his acts, but can no longer

See his mirrored face without recoil. (99)

The bus taking the pilgrims to Oberammergau transports a diverse group of pilgrims, just as did Chaucer’s cavalcade to Canterbury. We come to know their stories and we learn how the play itself affects each in a different way. Some find a type of redemption; others come to face themselves more honestly. None is the same person as the one who had set out four days before. Caroline has the last word:

I am indeed a part

Of all those I have met,

and must learn who I am.

Endings are beginnings.

So while I cannot see what lies ahead,

My journey too must end

As I return from Oberammergau. (324)

Emily Sutherland. Transnational Literature Vol. 6 no. 2, May,2014

Passion Play: The Oberammergau Tales, Valerie Volk, Wakefield Press

Pilgrimages are not generally thought of as the stuff of Protestants or non-believers. But many in our modern society do still go on pilgrimages, even if they are not named as such. For some, it may be war sites or art galleries. For Lutherans, the destinations may be Jerusalem, Wittenberg or the Barossa.

Valerie Volk’s book centres on a pilgrimage of sorts to Oberammergau in Germany, famous for its passion play held every ten years. She has taught The Canterbury Tales for many years, and models her book on Chaucer’s famous depiction of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. The Canterbury Tales, as scholar Sheila Fisher tells us in the introduction to her recent translation, is something of a neglected classic, even while we are given endless variations of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. But Chaucer’s work is extraordinary – innovative in its use of language and its introduction to English of new modes of poetry, and in its variety of portraiture. Volk’s book is not innovative in this sense. She replicates Chaucer’s series of life sketches, and is perhaps brave (in our modern, poetry-allergic era) in sticking to verse. However she innovates by placing the characters in a new time and place – the wife of Bath becomes a modern day gold-digging husband chaser, the cook is a celebrity chef, the ploughman is a Wimmera farmer of Silesian stock, and the squire is a punk with a drug habit. It would be a shame if the structure of the book put readers off, because this is a skilled and forceful rendering.

Chaucer’s work displays a bawdy medieval sensibility (much like Luther’s sometimes alarmingly scatological sense of humour). Pious readers may also be unsettled by Volk’s occasional crude language and frank discussions of sexuality. These pilgrims are not model citizens. They are scheming, sceptical and flawed. Or sometimes just earthy. Volk’s intention is to give us real people just as she gives us “types”, and she ventriloquizes masterfully as she inhabits the headspace of each individual, giving them realistic life stories and unique voices. As popular historian Peter Ackroyd notes of Chaucer’s originals, these characters are both “highly individualised and typically representative”.

As with Chaucer’s characters, there is appearance and there is reality. As with most (all?) of us, there is brokenness that has been badly patched or papered over. These pilgrims have vulnerabilities they cannot share, and pain that is pushed down out of sight. On display is a Lutheran idea of sin as a state rather than an individual act; of the sinner being “miserable” (as we in the Lutheran Church used to confess it), in the sense more of “sad” than “irredeemable”. Volk’s pilgrims display a world-weary emptiness and displacement, sometime masked by bravado, but they are somehow drawn to this two millennia-old story of brokenness and redemption that is re-enacted at Oberammergau. They have an inkling that while this religious stuff should be for people other than themselves, there may just be something in it.

Nick Mattiske: The Lutheran. July, 2014