 |
- General fiction - |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Walking Tour |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 The Walking Tour byKathryn Davis Houghton Mifflin 264 pages, 1999 ISBN 0395945410 Reviewed by Marie Thorpe, South Africa An abiding theme in all Kathryn Davis' novels is, in her own words, "the plight of a character embarked on a journey through an utterly unfamiliar (and frequently fantastic) landscape, generally in order to track down something of someone of ambiguous importance. The quest itself has never interested me as much as the chance to describe that other world and its inhabitants, and to use the encounter as a way of analyzing the rules that govern the so-called real world." In The Walking Tour, Davis tells the story of an incongruous group of people who embark on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The viewpoint character is Susan Rose, daughter of one of the travelling couples, who addresses the reader from the 21st Century. Both what happened during the tour and the moral question of what determines culpability are examined from various unusual angles by Susan Rose - and through her, by the reader. The world of the walking tour is a dream world, at times ecstatic and at times nightmarish. The reader veers from one to the other with the inconsequence of a dream. "The human mind, galloping like horses, swarming like bees, all over the place..." Indeed, bees swarm through the pages of this novel, symbolising both unease and the hazy peace of summer days - beauty side by side with menace. Yet, there is nothing dreamlike about Davis' razor-sharp accuracy in her observation of characters. She is not a sentimentalist. Her characters are portrayed with warts and all. In fact, the warts are sometimes a little too prominent for comfort. This is realism depicted in language of a lyrical beauty that is almost poetry. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||