The Fox's Walk [Paperback]

Annabel Davis-Goff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2004

Alice Moore is eight years old and has just been left in the care of her autocratic grandmother at Ballydavid, a lovely old house in the south of Ireland. It is 1915, the First World War has just entered its second year, and, in Ireland, Nation-alists are edging toward revolution. Often lonely and homesick, living in a rigid old-fashioned household where propriety is all-important, Alice pieces together the world around her from overheard conversations, servants' gossip, and her own quiet observations. She soon realizes that her family's privilege is maintained at great cost to others. With the war always in the background, blood is spilled closer to home, and tensions mount. Divided in her loyalties and affections, Alice must choose between her heritage of privilege, her growing moral conscience, and the demands of the future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A pivotal few years in Irish history-1912-1916-as seen through the eyes of a sensitive 10-year-old girl, whose immediate focus is her own sense of abandonment by her parents, is the piercingly affecting theme of Davis-Goff's new novel. As in her previous books (The Dower House; This Cold Country), Davis-Goff brilliantly chronicles the vanished world of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Left behind at her grandmother's country estate when her parents return to Dublin, Alice Moore at first chafes with desperate loneliness, bewilderment and misery at the strict rules of behavior in force at Ballydavid, the result of her aristocratic grandmother's preoccupation with the unbending social code of the Ascendancy. Gradually, she comes to love Ballydavid, while becoming aware of the events that signal the approaching end of its privileged status. Her uncle is killed during WWI, and the family's mourning seems endless. Rebellion is brewing in Ireland, the Easter Rising occurs and Sir Roger Casement, a Protestant considered a traitor to his class, will be martyred. With deft assurance, Davis-Goff conveys the complex social order of the Anglo-Irish hierarchy, in which class, religion and political thought, heretofore complacently stratified, are undergoing vital challenges. As she traces Alice's growing maturation, the narrative's elegiac tone and graceful prose do much to overcome the necessarily factual interpolations of historical events.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Davis-Goff continues to stake out her fictional territory--a milieu that is Anglo-Irish in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in an elegiac novel based partly on her mother's life, the central character is nine-year-old Alice, who is left behind at her grandmother's house, Ballydavid, when her parents and siblings return to London after their usual summer stay. Despite the fact that World War I is raging and causes a terrible family loss, and Irish nationalists threaten the status quo closer to home, Ballydavid seems sheltered from the turmoil, in part because of Grandmother's implacable resistance to change. Alice struggles with her own need for love as well as with emerging insights about both the people round her and events in the larger world. The novel proceeds at a stately pace, much like Grandmother's lumbering and rarely driven Sunbeam. The interest lies in the sharply observed characters and in the sensitive child's-eye view of a way of life that was soon lost. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; First Harvest Edition edition (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156030101
• ISBN-13: 978-0156030106
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,353,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and subtle, January 10, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Fox's Walk (Hardcover)

I enjoyed this book about the decline of Anglo-Irish society in Ireland during World War I although there was little dialogue and the author has a fondness for long run-on sentences using semicolons and dashes. These long sentences sometimes made the original thought hard to follow. I liked the main character, a little girl named Alice (narrating as a grown-up) who's left in the care of her genteel grandmother and great-aunt. Unsure of why she's been left, lonely, isolated, and given to sleep-walking, she still has a strong, observant character and develops a love for her new home. She worries about her future. It's made known that little Alice eventually marries a wild and rebellious local boy. I liked how that part of the story foreshadows Ireland's eventual revolution. After reading this book, I'd like to go on and read a history book about Ireland.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The last days of privilege, November 3, 2003

By 

Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fox's Walk (Hardcover)

This is a book that demands a little time. The narrator's voice, recalling an arid, lonely childhood during World War I, seems at first more plaintive than engaging, her circumstances more pitiable than interesting. But wait. Alice Moore is a curious, winsome child with awakening sensibilities. She soon draws you into a world so small and self-assured and complete its inhabitants cannot see the precipitous brink before them.

After a factual exposition of the case of Roger Casement, a protestant who tried to raise an army to drive the British from Ireland (these asides into the wider world occur throughout the narrative), Alice's story opens in 1912 Ballydavid, Ireland, at the estate of Alice's maternal grandmother, a woman of deep Anglo-Irish principles and conventions. "The entertaining of children was not, either in my family or in society at large, given the importance that it now has," Alice recalls, 50 years later. Hours of boredom and starched discomfort were punctuated by meals and sleep, with the occasional excitement of adult visitors. Alice would strive for invisibility, so as to hear their conversation.

After an interlude at their home in London, Alice and her mother return to Ballydavid the summer after the war begins. Her father, a frugal, unpretentious New Zealander, has never been completely accepted by her mother's family and seldom stayed long at Ballydavid. "When Mother was with her family, she was in the position of silently defending him from their silent criticisms, these unspoken thoughts batting around the room like shuttlecocks, inhibiting and coloring even the occasional remarks of day to day family life."

Much communication remains unspoken, from what is served at tea for visitors (or if tea is served), to articles of dress, deportment, and table manners. Much more communication is between the lines, the sort of bland, pointed remarks the British excel at, in novels, at least. And as the war drags on and signs of Irish unrest increase, culminating in the 1916 Easter Rising, more subjects become off limits.

But by then Alice has begun to note the contradictions in the world. Her mother, almost unhinged by a favorite brother's death in the war, has left Alice behind on her return to London. This abandonment in a grieving house of rigid, but largely unknown (to Alice) rules, leaves her desperate for love and stimulation. She is captivated by the unusual and the kind - the colorful Jewish wife of a neighbor, a down-on-her-luck refugee posing as a psychic countess, the noisy, brash son of a prominent Catholic, the kindly, superstitious servants.

Out of loneliness, Alice learns to love Ireland and question the order of her grandmother's life. A quiet pond in the midst of a raging storm, its surface cannot stay unruffled forever. And when that calm is shattered, Alice has a dilemma.

Davis-Goff ("The Dower House," "This Cold Country") creates this world in exquisite, telling detail. A captivating novel of manners and change, written with subtlety, wit, and deep understanding.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good story, but poor storytelling, May 22, 2007

By 

Margery L. Goldstein (Hudson, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fox's Walk (Paperback)

I agree with the other reader who reluctantly gave this book only two stars. I think that a strong editor could have turned this into a fine and memorable book, but the combination of interminable, irrelevant historical detail and an apparent policy of "tell, don't show" makes this book very frustrating to read.

Alice, the narrator (however one may sympathize with her repressed childhood) is a colorless woman who seems to think in textbook paragraphs and throws everything she can think of into her narrative. Does she sleepwalk? Who cares? It has no bearing on the story.

If I were the editor, I would have recommended
- that this book be written in third person rather than first person, unless the narrator can be given some personality.
- that the background information about politics be separated from the general text, perhaps in italics or in a clearly delineated preface to each section.
- that every incident and observation be fleshed out with details and substantiated by some evidence (however subjective), instead of being summarized. (For example, why does Alice consider O'Neill, her grandmother's manager, to be overbearing to his wife? Could the reader be shown an example of this?)

Too much of this book reads like an initial sketch or summary of a story, with pages of a history book inserted, instead of a finished work.