Walking away

Grrr. Blogger has gone funny again and I can't see how to post photos of the flower show I went to at the weekend. Ah well.

I'm interested in people's varied reactions to novels - eg the Harold Fry one. I read it for my book group and while most of us didn't like it much, a couple really loved it, like some of my commenters. I'd like to say first of all that I greatly admire anyone who can actually write a whole novel. It's not an easy thing to do and requires imagination and a lot of work.

But I actually found this one quite hard to struggle through. To me, it had an oppressive atmosphere: I finished it late at night and then couldn't sleep. It's about this old chap, Harold, who gets a letter from an ex-colleague who did something mysterious for him in the past. She's now dying. He sets out for a walk. Then he just keeps walking - from his home in the south of England to where she is in Berwick (I think it was) in the very north of England. At first it's quite intriguing but as he keeps walking, in his yachting shoes (not a term I was familiar with but then I don't do a lot of yachting) he gets terrible blisters and hardly eats. Yet he plods on, torturing himself by thinking about the past and about his son, whom he never sees (and it's quite easy to guess why not) and I found it all horribly depressing but at the same time unbelievable. A whole lot of new characters are introduced after a while but they aren't really very significant and then they all go away again, which seems rather pointless. And it's stressful because you don't know if he's going to reach his friend in time. And then in the end - why? - better not say, but .... hmm. Didn't like that bit either.

I realise that it's supposed to be a sort of fable with perhaps a nod to Pilgrim's Progress, and thus maybe it's unreasonable to expect it to be realistic. But then the style was intermittently jokey, which didn't seem to fit with this more serious aspiration.

But lots of people love it and it got good reviews so maybe I'm wrong.

A novel about a spontaneous journey that I much prefer is Anne Tyler's A Ladder of Years. In this, Delia (I think her name is) just walks off along the beach from her grown-up family, who no longer pay much attention to her, gets a lift to a nearby town and starts a new life. I could believe that someone might just do this, that events might turn out as they do in the book and that the emotions might be as described.

I suppose I first read this when the children were small. I used to teach evening classes and once a week I would rush out of the house when Mr L came home and tear up to the college, where I would become a different person: not the mummy of three small people who covered the house with a thin layer of toys and crayons and bit of card and paper but a wise teacher who knew about literature, sentence structure and how to pass (English) exams. And after the students went away, I would get myself organised to go home but feel a certain reluctance to do so - knowing that a couple of the children would be awake and bouncing around and that a certain amount of chaos would still reign. I would get in the car and drive towards home and vaguely fantasise about just driving on past the house till I got somewhere else... .

I mentioned this some friends the other day in an of-course-everyone-feels-like-this-sometimes sort of way and they looked at me and shook their heads in wonder and said... no-o-o.

I wouldn't actually have done it. But I think that's why I like the Anne Tyler so much and was disappointed in the Harold Fry book. I would have bought proper boots if I'd been him. And then got the train.