I just wrote this review a minute ago, and thanks to problems between WordPress and Jetpack it was lost. Tools that were once free are being updated to focus on trying to extract money from the users, making them increasingly frustrating to use, and so it is tough to sum up the all the words I just wrote just wrote. Ugh.
This book was quite a sad tale of an English man who started out with a pretty good life and somehow ended up watching things from the sidelines for the remainder. He receives a letter from someone who did him a kindness years ago, and sets out across England to visit – on foot.
Most of the book was interesting for me because it featured a solo journey, and despite being fiction I liked the adventure of it. But near the end that aspect of the story changes a bit and so I was much more into the first part of the book than the last.
I guess the goal of the book is to give humans a little more humanity, and certainly we can use all the help we can get these days. However there is a lot of sadness and regret in this story, and the final (sort of) redemption at the end doesn’t really balance it all out for me.
There are two other books featuring characters from this novel, and I just can’t see how they wouldn’t be as sad or sadder than this tale – people taking a passive view of their life and failing to communicate with those around them. I don’t think being English is really an excuse for this kind of behavior – but maybe that’s because I’m an American.
I’m hoping for a happier take on things with my next book along a similar vein, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson.
