The View
What’s the best depiction of walking in a novel? I can think of some contenders. (But fans of Virginia Woolf, look away now…)
LAST WEEK, BECAUSE of a clerical error I assume, I was at a swanky London media party. There were apricot negronis and tiny cheeseburgers, all free, and lots of famous people, though tbh (as they say) it was the first two items that interested me the most. I’m quite shallow like that, as I said to Tom Hollander and Sophie Raworth.
I realise that this is the kind of opening sentence more often found in the pages of Tatler or Heat than this firm and friendly, decidedly un-elitist periodical. But bear with me. There is a reason. Because, in the midst of all this epicurean glamour, there was a connection to the world of boots, Gore-Tex and curly sandwiches out of the rucksack. The occasion was a party to mark 20 years in publishing of the novelist, screenwriter and all-round lovely man David Nicholls. His next novel You Are Here is out in in the spring and I won’t give any spoilers beyond saying that it’s a gentle and hilarious romance set on Alfred Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk.
After the third or fourth negroni – did I mention they were free? – a few of us began trying to think of other novels that had walking (or ‘hiking’ as our transatlantic brethren insist on calling it) at their heart. Obviously Raynor Winn’s Wainwright Prize nominated and multi-million selling The Salt Path came up immediately. Someone else mentioned The Long Walk by Stephen King (under his Richard Bachman nom de plume), an early work and a kind of proto–Hunger Games. Set in a dystopian future controlled by a totalitarian regime, teenage boys take part in a gruelling hundred-mile walk to the death. There are stretches of the Pennine Way that feel like that, I mused.
This then reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Again, it’s no weekend amble. In fact it might be the bleakest novel I have ever read, later turned into a film that challenges Holiday on the Buses for grim humourlessness. It’s a story about a father and son’s very long walk, albeit one though the ecologically devastated post-apocalyptic ruins of civilisation rather than, say, Bourton-on-the-Water.
From what I recall from my teenage readings, great screeds of The Lord of the Rings are essentially descriptions of walking, with quite a lot of detail about shouldering packs, weather forecasting, navigating by starlight and ‘tigh
