I’d just read Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and was struck by the glorious simplicity of leaving home on foot, as Lee did, and walking through the English countryside. I decided a few years ago that I wanted to go on some sort of solo adventure. Tell us about the Thames Path and why it’s a focal point of this novel. Their journey along the 184-mile track opens up a space for the two of them to discuss the past and the present, helping them heal a rift that developed between them when they were 16 while confronting some hard truths about their adult lives. Simon Vance’s droll voiceover carried such moments, and the story’s momentum, well.In Richard Roper’s tender and funny novel two former school friends reunite after many years to fulfil a childhood promise to walk the Thames Path together. We always suspect there will be a satisfactory and satisfying resolution to his plight and his relationship with Peggy.Įven knowing all that in the back of my mind, it was still a fun listen and I laughed out loud, often. The usual complications ensue, and Roper handles them well, keeping us hoping against hope as Andrew stumbles from one escapade to another. They become partners in the work and drinking buddies at the pub. We, the reader or listener, suffer along with Andrew, hoping he can extricate himself from his self-imposed languor and make something of himself and his life, which is so overly focused of death.Īnd so, right on cue, a female named Peggy comes to work. A major complication is that he’s misrepresented himself to his boss in order to be employed and the lie is constantly getting in his way.
So we have a conventional comic novel setup here, the pathetic loner in a pathetic job. Its agents, if you will – such as our man Andrew – enter the home or flat to root through personal belongings in search of money stuffed under a mattress and names and addresses of the next of kin who should be contacted.
It’s a benevolent bureaucracy, its purpose being to learn if there are people – like family – who ought to know an elder has passed away unnoticed. He’s, a forlorn, reclusive, apparently long-suffering man of 42, who works for something called the “council,” which is apparently some British governmental agency that looks after elderly people who have died alone. The story centers on Andrew, his last name unspecified until near the end (as if it would make any difference, but which I assume was unmentioned to give him more of an “everyman” vibe).
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