ANTHOLOGY: TOM MORIARTYreviews The Burning Leg: Walking Scenes from Classic FictionEdited by Duncan Minshull, Hesperus Press, 100pp, £12.99
MARIO VARGAS Llosa, in his novel, The Storyteller, tells us of "the men who walk". In the heart of the Amazon jungle the storytellers of the Machiguenga tribe keep their precious myths and legends alive by walking vast distances through the jungle to relate them, in the manner of an Irish seanchaí, to gatherings of their fellow tribesmen. "Moving, walking. Keeping on, with or without rain, by land or by water, climbing up the mountain slopes or climbing down the ravines". We encounter, through Vargas Llosa's prose, the rhythm of walking and experience the endurance walkers are capable of. In Cormac McCarthy's The Roadwe find a man and his son walking on in a post apocalyptic landscape when almost all hope has been lost: "Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south, there'd be no surviving another winter here."
Minshull’s slim volume presents us with 35 examples of fictional walking and, as there’s much to choose from, we may judge the extracts on whether, like Vargas Llosa and McCarthy, they make us part of the walk, walking with the protagonists, in fear and terror, in love and passion or, sometimes, simply having a jolly good day out.
Many of the extracts are too short to establish a walking rhythm: Robinson Crusoe walks along the shore and finds Friday’s footprint; Guy de Maupassant’s officer walks under the window of the beautiful Irma and is duly accepted into her bed. Minshull includes many short pieces like these but a good walk needs time and space to develop.
It follows then, that, as with walks themselves, the longer ones tend to be more satisfying: in Hardy's The Return of the Native, Mrs Yeobright walks through the stifling heat of August to her son's house, her agitated mental state made worse by the torrid conditions. Edgar Allan Poe's narrator in The Man of the Crowdfollows a decrepit but tireless old man all over London from dusk until dawn until dusk again before giving up in despair. Mark Twain and Henry Fielding contribute amusing accounts of bumbling walkers (in The Rigi Kulmand Joseph Andrews, respectively). DH Lawrence ( Women in Love) and Henry James ( Daisy Miller) tell tales of lust, the former directly and the latter, typically, indirectly. The extract from Zola's Germinaldepicts an out-of-control mob of starving workers from the viewpoint of an increasingly frightened bourgeois family.
Good as these stories are, there are even better ones. Perhaps the most dramatic piece is Jack London's To Build a Fire, an unforgettable account of a man freezing to death while walking in temperatures of 50 below zero along the frozen Yukon River.
Dostoevsky's paranoid narrator in Notes from Undergroundis a masterly study in self-absorbed madness. Best of all is Kafka's little contribution, A Sudden Walk, which is essentially just one long, breathless sentence portraying the walker's inability to stay by his fireside for the night and his body's need to get outside and walk so that " . . . we ourselves, as indisputable and sharp and black as a silhouette, smacking the backs of our thighs, come into our true nature". Kafka's prose, unlike the poised contributions of Henry James or Jane Austen ( Pride and Prejudice), dares to capture directly the addiction of the walker to the walk.
Almost all of the "classic" authors represented here are very familiar. But a lesser-known story is Richard Middleton's On the Brighton Road, a gentle story of a tramp and a mysterious youth, which contains the youth's sage advice to the tramp not to expect anything at the other end of the walk – advice which, if we are walking for pleasure and not from necessity, thankfully does not normally apply.
Tom Moriarty is an Irish Timesjournalist . He has enjoyed walks in Patagonia, the Peruvian Andes, the Atacama Desert, the Himalayas and in Wicklow on many a Sunday.
