"A brilliantly dexterous novel." — New York Times
"Beguiling and bracing." — Los Angeles Times Book Review
"So ambitious, so smart, so beautifully written that it is a pleasure to stand in its light." — Mirabella
At the turn of the twentieth century, two couples—the artist Carole
Ridingham and her businessman husband, Bobby Rose, and Bobby's partner,
Coleman Snow, and his wife, Ruth Farr—embark on a walking tour
of southern Wales. During that tour a fatal accident occurs. The question
of exactly what happened at storm-lashed Worms Head, at the western
tip of the Gower peninsula, preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence
trial, but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's only child, Susan.
Susan lives alone in her parents' ruined house near the coast of Maine,
addressing us from a future in which nature itself has been drastically
transformed, a future providing an unusual perspective on the way
we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, her mother's letters,
photographs taken by Coleman, a notebook computer containing Ruth
Farr's journal, and a menacing young vagrant named Monkey, Susan ultimately
identifies the moral predicament at the heart of her parents' lives
and work—and at the heart of the book: we are morally culpable
beings despite our imperfect knowledge of ourselves and the world.
As beautiful and unpredictable as the Welsh landscape through which the
touring party moves—and as Carole Ridingham herself—The
Walking Tour is part mystery, part courtroom drama, part restructured
myth, part futuristic morality fable, and part shrewd meditation on
the uneasy marriage of art and commerce and the uneasy relationships
of men and women. In a sequence of worlds—from ancient Wales
through postapocalypse Maine—in which "time has no meaning" and
in which legends from the distant past impinge on tomorrow's daily
life, Kathryn Davis has constructed a novel of mystifying wizardry,
moral certitude, and absolute artistry. Like the paintings of Carole
Ridingham, The Walking Tour presents the familiar world through a
totally new vision.
We hope the following questions will stimulate
discussion for reading groups and, for every reader, provide a deeper
understanding of The Walking Tour.
1.
What is the significance of the "ruined house and acreage" that Susan,
Carole, and Bobby once called home? Why is it important that Susan
tells her story from the midst of this ruin? What other ruins occur
in the novel (Tintern Abbey and Bobby's library, for example), and
what is their significance?
2.
Susan raises the issue of agendas at the very beginning of her narration.
What agendas, overt and covert, can we ascribe to Carole, Bobby, Ruth,
and Coleman as they set out on their walking tour? To what degree
does each of them reach his or her goal? What is Susan's agenda, and
does she reach her goal?
3.
Susan comments that her mother couldn't stop herself from filling
her paintings with objects, "since God knows there's comfort to be
had in endlessly filling the intolerable void with familiar objects."
In what ways do the people in this novel, including both Carole and
Susan, fill "the intolerable void"?
4.
Brenda Fluellen's brochure includes the sentence "In Cymru time has
no meaning." What are the implications of this statement in relation
to the Welsh legends alluded to by Davis, to the events of the walking
tour, and to Susan's reconstruction of those events?
5.
Referring to the distorted perspective (anamorphosis) used in Holbein's
famous painting The Ambassadors, Susan mentions Holbein's and Carole's
"using tricks of perspective to so distort an object so that it can
be comprehended only from an unusual angle or through a special lens."
To what extent is the perspective of each character, including Susan,
distorted? What are the consequences of distorted perspectives?
6.
How might Carole's poems apply to the characters and events of the
novel? Who are the hare, mouse, and other prey? Who are the devil's
hound, white tomcat, and other hunters? What is especially significant
about the repeated final verse: "cunning and art / you do not lack
/ but always the whistle / will fetch you back!"? Why aren't cunning
and art enough?
7.
SnowWrite & RoseRead became, in Susan's words, "a sinister tool that
changed how people saw the world." How was it sinister? How has it
changed the way people, including Susan, see the world? Susan goes
on to wonder how it worked, "By which I mean morally, not technically."
To what extent have computers affected our ability to make moral choices?
Carole said, in connection with SnowWrite & RoseRead, that "The dish
ran away with the spoon." She meant by this, says Susan, "when art
went out the window, morality went along with it." In what ways might
art sustain morality?
8.
Susan describes the landscape of Coleman's photographs as "A brutal
landscape, dangerous and strange, but also enchantingly beautiful."
In what ways is this an accurate description—or not—of our
actual world; the world of Carole, Bobby, Ruth, and Coleman; and Susan's
and Monkey's world? What is the relationship between beauty and danger?
9.
"The dream boy was me," Monkey tells Susan. "She [Ruth] dreamed me
up and now here I am, at your service." What is the relationship between
Monkey and the gray "dream boy" encountered by Ruth in Llangleisiad?
How are we to understand the clause, "the dream boy spread his wings
and flew"? What is special about where Monkey first claims he lives—"a
most beautiful country filled with streams and meadows, woods and
plains"—and how does it relate him to the walking tour?
10.
"In any given situation," says Susan, "whoever has the most at
stake usually has the least power." How does this statement apply
to Susan herself, and to individual participants in the walking tour?
What does each have at stake and what degree of power—and what
kind of power—does each wield?
11.
Coleman decided that his new program board "far exceeded anything
Bobby was capable of understanding, let alone imagining. And when
a man, even a very smart one, messed with things beyond the realm
of his imagination, he ran the risk of corrupting either the things
being messed with or the people they affected or, more often, himself."
How do these statements apply to Bobby and to others? What kinds of
corruption—moral, physical, aesthetic, and other—occur in
The Walking Tour, and who or what is responsible in each instance?
12.
When she sees the five paintings in the bomb shelter that Monkey and
Peggy have taken over, Susan expresses unalloyed surprise. "But where
on earth did the paintings come from?" she asks; "when on earth did
she paint them? Because there are things in them. . . that she couldn't
possibly have known about before she went to Wales." How would you
explain the existence of these paintings? What are the implications
of their existence?
13.
Near the novel's end and in connection with her mother's painting
of Worms Head, Susan refers to "redemption"—"in this case not
to a spiritual act but to a physical problem confronting the painter
in oils." In what ways do spiritual redemption and the painter's technical
redemption operate in the novel? How might each kind of redemption
reveal the truth underlying surface appearances?
14.
Near the end of Susan's narration we learn that it was Carole who
planned the walking tour and made the first contact with the Fluellens
and that it was "poor Mr. Snow" who signed the deposit check. To what
extent do these revelations help to clarify the motives, relationships,
and events that have gone before and the walking tour's outcome? In
what ways does Carole exercise "her independent spirit," and with
what consequences for herself and others?
Kathryn Davis is the author of three previous novels: Labrador (1988), The Girl
Who Trod on a Loaf (1993), and Hell (1998), the first of which won the
1989 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Davis's short stories and poems have
appeared in The American Poetry Review, Antaeus, The Antioch Review,
The Atlantic, Esquire, Ploughshares, and other magazines. She has twice
received grants from both the Vermont Council on the Arts and the National
Endowment for the Arts; and in 1999 she received the Morton Dauwen Zabel
Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1946. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy
of Fine Arts and Barnard College and received her B.A. from Goddard
College. She is a professor of literature at Skidmore College in Saratoga
Springs, New York, and lives with her husband and their daughter in
Vermont. She is at work on her fifth novel.
A Conversion with Kathryn Davis
Q) Why did you choose to write about computers, a subject you know nothing about?
A) Computers
first captured my imagination at least five years ago. I was minding
my own business, typing along, when suddenly I saw my words begin
to leak away line by line, starting at the bottom of the screen
and gradually moving toward the top. I closed the file quickly;
shortly thereafter I couldnąt believe my eyes when I called up a
different file and saw the exact words that had been draining out
of the earlier file pouring back in at the bottom of the screen.
"Leak," "drain," "pour" — as
the words suggest, the phenomenon struck me as watery, tidal in
fact, a concept I retained in The Walking Tour in my description
of SnowWrite & RoseRead. The phenomenon also struck me as eerie,
uncanny, menacing — evidence of a mysterious aperture, a point of
intersection between two apparently dissimilar worlds. My imagination
became wholly engaged.
Q) When did you begin writing?
A) My first book was called The Silver Sledge — I
was probably about seven when I wrote and illustrated it. Now, as
then, I'm interested in the plight of a character embarked on a
journey through an utterly unfamiliar (and frequently fantastic)
landscape, generally in order to track down something or someone
of ambiguous importance. The quest itself has never interested me
as much as the chance to describe that other world and its inhabitants,
and to use the encounter as a way of analyzing the rules that govern
the so-called real world.
When I write, it's in order to be able to dwell in that other place;
when I was seven years old, writing The Silver Sledge, it was the
place I was making for myself apart from the grim household of my
childhood. When I'm there, everything is vital, shimmering, elusive.
Q) You frequently juxtapose a few narrative voices or positions in space or time? Why is that?
A) Generally I consider myself to be a very single-minded person; I can't do more
than one thing at a time. Unlike most of my friends, for example,
I can't talk on the phone while performing other activities. I suppose
there are advantages to this personality trait — without
it I probably never would have been able to finish writing a novel.
But there are also clear disadvantages; and I suspect my preference
for juxtaposition might be one of the ways I've devised to overcome
the problem.
In The Walking Tour, I knew I had things I wanted to say about the way
we live now, but that the idea of speaking from the present seemed
cramped and limited. It also struck me that to speak in such an analytical
way about the present from the present might elicit a didactic tone
that would be the kiss of death to any narrative, and that to speak
about the present from the past would be silly. Clearly my best choice
was to speak about the present from the future, except that then,
God help me, I'd be writing science fiction, and the last thing in
the world I wanted to hear coming out of my narrator's mouth was anything
even remotely like, "and then I climbed into my hovercraft. . . "
As it turned out, the challenge of creating a viable "future" — a
world I could describe without dying of embarrassment at the mere
thought of having attempted such a thing — became
one of my favorite aspects of the writing of this novel.
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