The Pagan Madonna — Reading Companion

Chance as the Blind Madonna

The title phrase appears early: “every move you make is governed by Chance—the Blind Madonna of the Pagan.” The narrator attributes the coinage to Stevenson, framing chance as a capricious, pagan deity. This idea recurs in dialogue: when Cleigh warns of fate, Cleve replies, “Fate? Why, she’s our chief engineer!” The novel treats chance not as abstract luck but as a force that spins, whirls, and jolts characters out of their orbits. Ling Foo is “flung into a great game and immediately cast out of it,” a pattern that may apply to others.

The Rogue as Art Collector

Cunningham is described as “a queer duck” with vast knowledge of the arts, a man who has been chased by the Mikado’s agents for royal-silk tapestry, entered Tibet for a lama’s ghost mask, and escaped a Rajput haremlik with a fabulous rug. He recounts these exploits “deprecatingly, after the manner of a boy relating some college escapades.” His physical deformity is noted, and his cruelty compared to a wolf. Yet he is also an efficiency expert who has planned everything—except fate. The tension between his cultured pursuits and his ruthless pragmatism is a central contrast.

Pride and the Unspoken Veil

Jane observes a wall of pride “Alpine high” between Cleigh and his son Dennison. Dennison refuses to touch twenty thousand dollars deposited to his account, because doing so would admit Cleigh’s right to strike him across the mouth. The blow itself is never explained; Jane sees only “behind a corner of this peculiar veil.” The narrative withholds motives and backstory, leaving the reader to infer from gestures and silences. This restraint contrasts with Cunningham’s garrulous storytelling, creating a layered texture of revelation and concealment.

Readers should attend to the novel’s structural use of chance: events are often set in motion by coincidence or unexplained decisions, and characters frequently act on incomplete information. The excerpts offer glimpses of a globe-trotting plot involving art theft, maritime travel, and family estrangement, but the full design remains obscured. The narrative voice, which shifts from direct address to close third-person, rewards attention to its rhetorical gambits and deliberate gaps.

That MacGrath book made me think of a quieter longing—the way The Call of the North — Reading Notes lingers with a similar ache, that pull between the familiar and the far-off. How some stories stay not because of plot, but because they remind you of a feeling you almost forgot you had. I kept turning pages slowly, just to sit with it a little longer.