The Wanderers

   

    Tim Pears' The Wanderers is the second part of his West Country Trilogy and takes up young Leo Sercombe's story where The Horseman (one of my books of the year last year) left off.

     It's June, 1912, and Leo is on the move while his friend Lottie Prideaux faces changes at her family home. To say any more would be to say too much, both about this book and the first volume, if you've yet to read it, but the epigraph, from Genesis, 4: 12-14, " [...] I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth", is clue enough.

    Over a period of two years Leo's journey through the West Country takes him down the byways of being as he encounters people living on the edges of society, surviving on their wits or on their exploitation of others. This sense of displacement and of being 'beyond', captured in the following passage, marks the book:

    "The boy felt as if the calendar and the clock, the normal measurement of time, even time itself as he had been taught to understand it, had been left behind. It still existed, elsewhere, but [... he had moved] into a parallel time of no past or future but only an ever on-rolling now."

    In that present Leo is alert to all around him as before. He feels the shift of the seasons, observes the flora and fauna with an even closer, more urgent, engagement, and notices his own growth. But in essence he's adrift, and at times in danger of becoming becalmed, and if I've a quibble about the book (aside from a couple of anachronistic terms which should have caught an editor's eye) it's that here and there the same could be said of it.

    But Tim Pears has the measure of his material. He is good on dialogue, although he favours the characters' interior lives; he knows his topography, his period, and he stays surely within the register he's chosen for his narrative. There are some passages for which you'll need a strong stomach (one I skipped entirely when I saw where it was heading), but there's nothing gratuitous here - it speaks of its time.

    I'm looking forward very much to reading volume 3.

Comments

[LizF]

I loved The Horseman so I am really looking forward to reading The Wanderers but I will bear in mind your comments about the requirement for a strong stomach at times!

[Cornflower]

Do!