A short foray into plot synopsis will tip off fans of Marilyn Bowering’s fiction that with Cat’s Pilgrimage they are in familiar territory. A drunken teenage party leaves a girl dead, and the gay boy who tried to save her unconscious. Fourteen year-old Cathreen finds an airplane ticket with her name on it in a boot in her mother’s closet and flees Vancouver Island for England, oblivious to the cat stowed away in her backpack. Her father, Jag, fails to meet her plane because he is torching the house he lived in with his sister before she married the evil man who destroyed her. In frantic flight, Jag stumbles on a bog man, long embalmed in a peaty grave, and reanimates him with a mysterious red stone.

This summary of the first 80 pages not only oversimplifies but unfairly misrepresents the power of Bowering’s art. The West Coast writer’s magic realism makes talking cats or a bog man infatuated with the television image of Pamela Anderson of Baywatch perfectly plausible. Bowering’s cadences soon mesmerize, the pages turning rapidly of their own accord.

In her previous novel, Visible Worlds, the pileup of stories and connections formed themselves into a time-slipping Norse saga. This time the saga is Anglo-Saxon. At its heart is a cat, dog, and donkey, three stones from Lucifer’s crown, and the ancient Zodiac earthworks at Glastonbury. The weave of many life stories is rich and complex, the characterization often deft. Oddly, Jag’s cruel brother-in-law seems less credible than a revived bog man or a poetry-writing cat, and by the end of the novel, the narrative, stretched from B.C. to Glastonbury and back, feels suddenly attenuated by geographic exhaustion. But the stories and their wrenching evocations of love and loss still resonate.