A touching account of friendship and betrayal in Moorish Spain, Walk On, Bright Boy evokes the pleasures and purposes of walking as a way of engaging with life. Marrying a coming-of-age tale with Gothic horror, it is at once an adventure story, a celebration of the power of dreams, magic and illusion, and an uplifting fable about the joys of living, even in the shadow of death. Both timely and timeless, it can be read as an allegory of contemporary political expediencies and as a parable of personal enlightenment.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Written in the form of a confession by an elderly man looking back on the defining incident of his youth, Davis's brief debut takes place in a remote Spanish village during the Inquisition, after the Christians have conquered Moorish Spain. As a young man, the narrator befriends a Moor, who entertains the village children with stories and songs, and introduces them to the spiritual joy of walking. When some of the children disappear, an Inquisitor arrives to find the perpetrator and very quickly accuses the Moor of being a witch. Despite his best efforts to aid his friend, the narrator finds that the trial has been rigged by the Inquisitor, and the Moor will be found guilty and executed. When the narrator stumbles across the horrifying truth about what happened to the missing boys, he finds himself embarking on the longest walk of his young life. A combination of morality tale and gothic horror, the book raises questions about religious extremism, faith, miracles, justice and torture, but by-the-numbers plotting and thin characters drain the novel of emotional resonance. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
A spare allegory of inquisition, miracle, and redemption.
While not a historical novel, Davis's debut is set in a vague, almost mythic past, after the Christian defeat of Muslim rule in the early Renaissance. The author is not interested in immersing us in historic density, however, but rather working by symbol and suggestion. The characters are either unnamed (the narrator) or given allegorical epithets (the Moor, the Inquisitor, the Factor). The narrator begins by recounting, some 70 years after the event, a boyhood memory of his attraction to the Moor, a charismatic acequero who helped teach Christian settlers how to irrigate the harsh, arid, and mountainous land they inhabit. The Moor has a wealth of lore and narrative to beguile the village children, but he's by definition an outsider--he's also accused of blasphemy after imitating Christ's miracle of walking on water. An Inquisitor shows up to query the villagers, and eventually a show trial occurs in which the Moor is condemned and shortly thereafter executed. Years after this trauma, the boy still feels guilty of betrayal, for he's the one person who had intended to remain loyal to the Moor. Meanwhile, true evil shows up in the physically and morally deformed Factor, who is employed by the local monastery and who keeps pet lambs that he periodically sacrifices in a gruesome manner. He kidnaps the narrator and almost turns him into another sacrificial lamb. The novel concludes lyrically with the narrator returning years later to his village and experiencing a miracle that leads him to realize that "if you choose an existence that lacks illusion and does not convert the clod of being to a thing of wonder and celebration, then you will die before you have ever lived..."
A poetic meditation on guilt and faith. - --Kirkus
The Spanish Inquisition, which instituted mass conversions of Jews to Catholicism and the expulsion of the Moors, was only reluctantly endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, it was largely a political maneuver by Ferdinand V and Isabella to unify the disparate principalities of Spain and push the Ottoman Turks out of the southern regions. This medieval site of religious oppression and political expediency provides the setting of Charles Davis' haunting novel Walk On, Bright Boy, the story of a young boy's friendship with a Moor who is targeted by the Inquisition.
In many ways a gothic novel, Walk On, Bright Boy narrates the moral bildungsroman of a nine-year-old Spaniard, whose horrifying encounters with humanity in the shape of the ruthless Inquisition, a xenophobic community, and a psychopathic tithe collector would seem reason to lose faith altogether. But the novel is also an assertion of spirituality shaped by the traumas of childhood, a Moor's lessons in observing the world, Gnostic thought, and an education through the Catholic Church. The title of the novel is a translated phrase from a novel by medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Tufayl about a boy who grows up in isolation but discovers the same spiritual truths as the highest authorities in the world.
As the title suggests, the novel is about walking as a vehicle for seeing the world, thinking, becoming part of a landscape, even of narrating experience. From the Moor, the narrator learns the gift of walking in the mountains near their village: walking was a form of storytelling in itself, a way of finding your way through the world. Walking is also an ecological act, for it is a literal engagement with a physical place. The landscape, the narrator says, breathes with the rhythm of your walking, as if conspiring with your progress to create a private perfection of harmony in which there are no barriers between you and the world.
Charles Davis' first novel reflects his own peripatetic travels far from his native England to Sudan, Turkey, Ivory Coast, Spain, and France, and it explores the exhilarations and fears of the engagement with strange geographies and foreign cultures. Notwithstanding the use of ubiquitous Christian imagery, the prose is truly insightful, economical, and almost lyrical in its portrayal of the complexities of human action. A short narrative, Walk On, Bright Boy leaves the reader curious about the implied frame of the novel, a manuscript confession written for the Inquisition.
Despite its setting in medieval Spain, the novel speaks to contemporary collisions of political expediency and religious faith throughout the world. It is a reminder of the complexities of an individual's allegiance to religion, community, nation, and geographic place. (September)
-Keya Kraft --ForeWard Magazine
This beautifully written novella proves less is more. Eloquent and elegant, with stunning metaphors and rhythmic cadences that alternate between short, declarative sentences that expand with ironic meaning and lyrical descriptions of nature that flesh out spiritual resonance, Walk On, Bright Boy invites reading out loud which in many ways is its literary heritage. Whoever you are, Charles Davis, keep at it (a second novel, Walking the Dog is due out next year). It's a good guess, however, that Walk On, Bright Boy a real occasion to use the overworked expression tour de force will remain unique. A suggestion: don't read it straight through. Take it, like good wine, slowly, savoring the taste of its descriptive prose. It is not to be rushed much like walking for pleasure. The experience, not the destination, is all. A second suggestion: if you happen to come across a so-called review of this book in Publishers Weekly toss it.
An unnamed priest, having reached a powerful position in the Church, is dictating his life story to an amanuensis he will not identify, not knowing if his words will be read by the Lords of the Inquisition who will soon take his life. It's not that at 80 the priest has become a Gnostic: He has always been a skeptic of pomp and circumstance. He has never forgotten a traumatic event in his childhood that provided him with a touchstone of how to value truth, justice and beauty, an experience that is at the center of the novel. It will be said that the book is an allegory, a parable, a timeless tale of betrayal and faith, guilt and redemption, compromise and survival, and that its setting, 17th century Spain, invites an anti-clerical reading of the hypocrisy, cruelty and insidious power of organized religion to enforce moral absolutes. But as the narrator says, a story is not only content but language and form. In this regard Walk On, Bright Boy is not just the recollections of a Jesuit priest who feels he betrayed a friend but a poetic celebration of the sensual world that friend introduced him to.
Walk On, Bright Boy, which takes its title from an Arabic text, is about understanding the universe by observing its wonders, especially as these are seen and felt in childhood a time of wonder, magic and exploring, seeking, learning that is all but lost to most adults. An exception proves to be the unconverted Moor who lived in the narrator's aldea, or remote village. The Moor was a harmless, unlettered infidel in a region all but conquered by the Church, a pied piper whose walks into the mountains and along the village waterway delighted the children who followed him, for his tales and tricks. He was, in other words, the perfect scapegoat for Inquisitors would hedge in God with dark ledgers of regulation and a cult of death. Now, decades later, after a long and successful clerical career, the priest confesses, but the Inquisitors, as he sarcastically observes, will not understand. His con-fession is in the etymological sense of the word, keeping faith with the intuitions of his childhood. To the disgust of his parents and fellow villagers he had defended the Moor against the trumped up charge of being a witch, but then was slyly manipulated by a clever Inquisitor into repeating words that inadvertently condemned the Moor to death.
Davis infuses his narrative with local color (Spanish words remain untranslated), suspense and unexpected complexity (pathology in the guise of religious zeal). If the ending seems a bit obvious, about the ultimate importance of friendship, loving kindness and devotion, the message is encased in such fine writing that the story telling eclipses the story which is the book's theme.
reviewed by Joan Baum --The Independent
While not a historical novel, Davis's debut is set in a vague, almost mythic past, after the Christian defeat of Muslim rule in the early Renaissance. The author is not interested in immersing us in historic density, however, but rather working by symbol and suggestion. The characters are either unnamed (the narrator) or given allegorical epithets (the Moor, the Inquisitor, the Factor). The narrator begins by recounting, some 70 years after the event, a boyhood memory of his attraction to the Moor, a charismatic acequero who helped teach Christian settlers how to irrigate the harsh, arid, and mountainous land they inhabit. The Moor has a wealth of lore and narrative to beguile the village children, but he's by definition an outsider--he's also accused of blasphemy after imitating Christ's miracle of walking on water. An Inquisitor shows up to query the villagers, and eventually a show trial occurs in which the Moor is condemned and shortly thereafter executed. Years after this trauma, the boy still feels guilty of betrayal, for he's the one person who had intended to remain loyal to the Moor. Meanwhile, true evil shows up in the physically and morally deformed Factor, who is employed by the local monastery and who keeps pet lambs that he periodically sacrifices in a gruesome manner. He kidnaps the narrator and almost turns him into another sacrificial lamb. The novel concludes lyrically with the narrator returning years later to his village and experiencing a miracle that leads him to realize that "if you choose an existence that lacks illusion and does not convert the clod of being to a thing of wonder and celebration, then you will die before you have ever lived..."
A poetic meditation on guilt and faith. - --Kirkus
The Spanish Inquisition, which instituted mass conversions of Jews to Catholicism and the expulsion of the Moors, was only reluctantly endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, it was largely a political maneuver by Ferdinand V and Isabella to unify the disparate principalities of Spain and push the Ottoman Turks out of the southern regions. This medieval site of religious oppression and political expediency provides the setting of Charles Davis' haunting novel Walk On, Bright Boy, the story of a young boy's friendship with a Moor who is targeted by the Inquisition.
In many ways a gothic novel, Walk On, Bright Boy narrates the moral bildungsroman of a nine-year-old Spaniard, whose horrifying encounters with humanity in the shape of the ruthless Inquisition, a xenophobic community, and a psychopathic tithe collector would seem reason to lose faith altogether. But the novel is also an assertion of spirituality shaped by the traumas of childhood, a Moor's lessons in observing the world, Gnostic thought, and an education through the Catholic Church. The title of the novel is a translated phrase from a novel by medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Tufayl about a boy who grows up in isolation but discovers the same spiritual truths as the highest authorities in the world.
As the title suggests, the novel is about walking as a vehicle for seeing the world, thinking, becoming part of a landscape, even of narrating experience. From the Moor, the narrator learns the gift of walking in the mountains near their village: walking was a form of storytelling in itself, a way of finding your way through the world. Walking is also an ecological act, for it is a literal engagement with a physical place. The landscape, the narrator says, breathes with the rhythm of your walking, as if conspiring with your progress to create a private perfection of harmony in which there are no barriers between you and the world.
Charles Davis' first novel reflects his own peripatetic travels far from his native England to Sudan, Turkey, Ivory Coast, Spain, and France, and it explores the exhilarations and fears of the engagement with strange geographies and foreign cultures. Notwithstanding the use of ubiquitous Christian imagery, the prose is truly insightful, economical, and almost lyrical in its portrayal of the complexities of human action. A short narrative, Walk On, Bright Boy leaves the reader curious about the implied frame of the novel, a manuscript confession written for the Inquisition.
Despite its setting in medieval Spain, the novel speaks to contemporary collisions of political expediency and religious faith throughout the world. It is a reminder of the complexities of an individual's allegiance to religion, community, nation, and geographic place. (September)
-Keya Kraft --ForeWard Magazine
This beautifully written novella proves less is more. Eloquent and elegant, with stunning metaphors and rhythmic cadences that alternate between short, declarative sentences that expand with ironic meaning and lyrical descriptions of nature that flesh out spiritual resonance, Walk On, Bright Boy invites reading out loud which in many ways is its literary heritage. Whoever you are, Charles Davis, keep at it (a second novel, Walking the Dog is due out next year). It's a good guess, however, that Walk On, Bright Boy a real occasion to use the overworked expression tour de force will remain unique. A suggestion: don't read it straight through. Take it, like good wine, slowly, savoring the taste of its descriptive prose. It is not to be rushed much like walking for pleasure. The experience, not the destination, is all. A second suggestion: if you happen to come across a so-called review of this book in Publishers Weekly toss it.
An unnamed priest, having reached a powerful position in the Church, is dictating his life story to an amanuensis he will not identify, not knowing if his words will be read by the Lords of the Inquisition who will soon take his life. It's not that at 80 the priest has become a Gnostic: He has always been a skeptic of pomp and circumstance. He has never forgotten a traumatic event in his childhood that provided him with a touchstone of how to value truth, justice and beauty, an experience that is at the center of the novel. It will be said that the book is an allegory, a parable, a timeless tale of betrayal and faith, guilt and redemption, compromise and survival, and that its setting, 17th century Spain, invites an anti-clerical reading of the hypocrisy, cruelty and insidious power of organized religion to enforce moral absolutes. But as the narrator says, a story is not only content but language and form. In this regard Walk On, Bright Boy is not just the recollections of a Jesuit priest who feels he betrayed a friend but a poetic celebration of the sensual world that friend introduced him to.
Walk On, Bright Boy, which takes its title from an Arabic text, is about understanding the universe by observing its wonders, especially as these are seen and felt in childhood a time of wonder, magic and exploring, seeking, learning that is all but lost to most adults. An exception proves to be the unconverted Moor who lived in the narrator's aldea, or remote village. The Moor was a harmless, unlettered infidel in a region all but conquered by the Church, a pied piper whose walks into the mountains and along the village waterway delighted the children who followed him, for his tales and tricks. He was, in other words, the perfect scapegoat for Inquisitors would hedge in God with dark ledgers of regulation and a cult of death. Now, decades later, after a long and successful clerical career, the priest confesses, but the Inquisitors, as he sarcastically observes, will not understand. His con-fession is in the etymological sense of the word, keeping faith with the intuitions of his childhood. To the disgust of his parents and fellow villagers he had defended the Moor against the trumped up charge of being a witch, but then was slyly manipulated by a clever Inquisitor into repeating words that inadvertently condemned the Moor to death.
Davis infuses his narrative with local color (Spanish words remain untranslated), suspense and unexpected complexity (pathology in the guise of religious zeal). If the ending seems a bit obvious, about the ultimate importance of friendship, loving kindness and devotion, the message is encased in such fine writing that the story telling eclipses the story which is the book's theme.
reviewed by Joan Baum --The Independent
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More About the Author
Charles Davis was born and educated, and has travelled and worked. He now lives and writes. That has always seemed to me to be enough biography for any writer, but being an avid reader, too, I appreciate that curiosity demands a bit more, so . . . .
Basically, middle-class boy born in the suburbs of London in 1960. Idyllic childhood brought to an abrupt end by being sent to boarding school aged 11. An unhappy adolescence (aren't they all?) climaxed with the timid decision that I wanted to write - 'timid' because, as I understood it, middle-class boys from the suburbs didn't write novels; I was none too sure who did, but fairly certain it wasn't people like me.
After a dissolute time at university, it occurred to me that if I wanted to write, I'd better get on and write something (I'm sharp like that), so I sat down and, through my mid to late twenties, churned out a novel a year. I always found plenty of publishers and agents ready to read these outpourings, but since I never took the trouble to rewrite them, they were all rejected and rightly so.
At the same time, more or less by accident, I got a job teaching in Sudan. Spent 15 months there, but decided to come back to Europe, partly because I feared that if I stayed any longer I'd never get out, partly because I acquired an interesting cocktail of obscure maladies that landed me in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, where the student doctors couldn't believe their good luck.
Next job took me to Turkey, where I met Jeannette, a French maths teacher sixteen years older than me, a disparity in age that allowed us to become friends before it occurred to us that we might actually make a couple. We recently celebrated our twentieth non-wedding anniversary. In the course of our time together, I became a grandfather-in-common-law at the age of 34, and I am now the proud something or other of three grandchildren without having gone through the angst and expense of having children myself.
Jeannette wanted to go to South America, I wanted to go to China, so naturally we ended up in Ivory Coast. Spent two years there, but seeing that the future of the country was looking dim and being unwilling to witness the sort of butchery then going on in Rwanda, we returned to Europe, settling in Spain, where we lived for twelve years.
It was in Ivory Coast and Spain that I wrote my first serious novel, 'serious' in that I wrote it and rewrote it time and again, so much so that it eventually dominated five years of my life. Had ten years of near misses, various novels attracting various degrees of praise from various publishers, but not enough to get them to put their money on the table.
In 2003, Jeannette took early retirement. This seemed like a terribly good idea, so when the opportunity came up to combine the passions of walking and writing in a series of guidebooks, I grasped it with both boots. I've since published fourteen walking guides (mainly about Spain, mainly with Discovery Walking Guides) and an alternative 'guide' to Brittany, Jeannette's birthplace, where we now live an absurdly privileged life with a couple of dogs whose lives are even more absurdly privileged.
Busy with the guidebooks, I had no time for fiction and consequently built up a good head of frustrated steam. Come Winter of 2005, we were looking after the farm of some friends in the south of France: bitterly cold, mud everywhere, squalor untold, goats and sheep giving birth every time you turned a corner, foxes prowling, donkeys disgruntled etc. etc. but time enough to do one or two hours writing every morning and afternoon. Since publishers had always complained that my previous novels were too long, I resolved to write something short. The first draft of Walk On, Bright Boy was written in two weeks, hunched over the kitchen table, wearing an overcoat and fingerless mittens, a rather ineffective petrol heater wheezing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, a lamb leaping about at my feet (I'm not making this up), housebirds chirping in the background, cat coiled in a speculative manner on top of the canary cage, wildfowl pecking at the door . . . well, you get the picture. The time limit and discomfort seem to have done some good. The novel proved shorter than I had anticipated, so very short I didn't think it would justify a discrete publication, but I'd said what I wanted to say so I sent it off to the Permanent Press and they accepted it.
They have since published Walking The Dog and Standing At The Crossroads. The reviews have been good, but sales have been dismal, so if there is to be a fourth novel, I need to shift a few copies.
Basically, middle-class boy born in the suburbs of London in 1960. Idyllic childhood brought to an abrupt end by being sent to boarding school aged 11. An unhappy adolescence (aren't they all?) climaxed with the timid decision that I wanted to write - 'timid' because, as I understood it, middle-class boys from the suburbs didn't write novels; I was none too sure who did, but fairly certain it wasn't people like me.
After a dissolute time at university, it occurred to me that if I wanted to write, I'd better get on and write something (I'm sharp like that), so I sat down and, through my mid to late twenties, churned out a novel a year. I always found plenty of publishers and agents ready to read these outpourings, but since I never took the trouble to rewrite them, they were all rejected and rightly so.
At the same time, more or less by accident, I got a job teaching in Sudan. Spent 15 months there, but decided to come back to Europe, partly because I feared that if I stayed any longer I'd never get out, partly because I acquired an interesting cocktail of obscure maladies that landed me in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, where the student doctors couldn't believe their good luck.
Next job took me to Turkey, where I met Jeannette, a French maths teacher sixteen years older than me, a disparity in age that allowed us to become friends before it occurred to us that we might actually make a couple. We recently celebrated our twentieth non-wedding anniversary. In the course of our time together, I became a grandfather-in-common-law at the age of 34, and I am now the proud something or other of three grandchildren without having gone through the angst and expense of having children myself.
Jeannette wanted to go to South America, I wanted to go to China, so naturally we ended up in Ivory Coast. Spent two years there, but seeing that the future of the country was looking dim and being unwilling to witness the sort of butchery then going on in Rwanda, we returned to Europe, settling in Spain, where we lived for twelve years.
It was in Ivory Coast and Spain that I wrote my first serious novel, 'serious' in that I wrote it and rewrote it time and again, so much so that it eventually dominated five years of my life. Had ten years of near misses, various novels attracting various degrees of praise from various publishers, but not enough to get them to put their money on the table.
In 2003, Jeannette took early retirement. This seemed like a terribly good idea, so when the opportunity came up to combine the passions of walking and writing in a series of guidebooks, I grasped it with both boots. I've since published fourteen walking guides (mainly about Spain, mainly with Discovery Walking Guides) and an alternative 'guide' to Brittany, Jeannette's birthplace, where we now live an absurdly privileged life with a couple of dogs whose lives are even more absurdly privileged.
Busy with the guidebooks, I had no time for fiction and consequently built up a good head of frustrated steam. Come Winter of 2005, we were looking after the farm of some friends in the south of France: bitterly cold, mud everywhere, squalor untold, goats and sheep giving birth every time you turned a corner, foxes prowling, donkeys disgruntled etc. etc. but time enough to do one or two hours writing every morning and afternoon. Since publishers had always complained that my previous novels were too long, I resolved to write something short. The first draft of Walk On, Bright Boy was written in two weeks, hunched over the kitchen table, wearing an overcoat and fingerless mittens, a rather ineffective petrol heater wheezing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, a lamb leaping about at my feet (I'm not making this up), housebirds chirping in the background, cat coiled in a speculative manner on top of the canary cage, wildfowl pecking at the door . . . well, you get the picture. The time limit and discomfort seem to have done some good. The novel proved shorter than I had anticipated, so very short I didn't think it would justify a discrete publication, but I'd said what I wanted to say so I sent it off to the Permanent Press and they accepted it.
They have since published Walking The Dog and Standing At The Crossroads. The reviews have been good, but sales have been dismal, so if there is to be a fourth novel, I need to shift a few copies.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Walking in Freedom,
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This review is from: Walk On, Bright Boy (Hardcover)
This is the second book by Charles Davis that I have read (after his more recent STANDING AT THE CROSSROADS) and I don't suppose it will be the last. There is a radiant humanity in his writing, and an attraction to thoughtful, independent characters who cut through the prejudices of their culture to seek for truth. Insofar as I can judge from only two books, his protagonists have a perfect balance between thought and action, equally at home on a mountain crag as in a book. As an English-born reader of a certain age, perhaps I am biased by recognizing something peculiarly British and slightly old-fashioned in this ideal (as in a novel, say, by Geoffrey Household), but it contributes largely to my enjoyment."My parents did not intend that I should learn letters, still less that I end my days confined and awaiting the pleasure of the Holy Spanish Inquisition...." The unnamed storyteller is writing in the early Sixteenth Century, telling of his childhood in a small mountain village in Southern Spain. The Moors have just been driven out of their last hold on the peninsula, and the village has been settled by people from the north. But one Moor remains, living in the hills and looking after the village's water supply. He is a figure of fascination to the children, entertaining them with simple tricks, telling stories salted with the wisdom of another culture, and above all teaching them to walk as a means of entering into harmony with the world and escaping into oneself: "Walking is the resource of the isolated and the solace of the powerless." There are only two other significant characters, both also unnamed. One is the coarse Factor, who collects taxes for the nearby monastery with a hefty surcharge for himself. The other is the Inquisitor, who comes to investigate certain accusations pointing to the Moor. The immediate course of the story is almost a foregone conclusion, as is the aged writer's eventual fate, but what the author does exceptionally well is to show the child's reluctantly dawning sympathy for the subtlety of the Inquisitor's mind, as well as his regret for the childhood mentor whom he unwittingly betrays. He will indeed learn his letters and enter the Church himself, but the mountaintop lessons taught by the Moor will never leave him. WALK ON, BRIGHT BOY is the same length as STANDING AT THE CROSSROADS (160 pages), but it feels slimmer, clearly a novella rather than a short novel. I was a little disappointed at first, missing the greater range of color, character, and event of the later book, and especially the reality of the setting in contemporary Sudan, where religious terrorism is still a burning issue. I wonder if Davis's future books will continue to grow in this way. But I realize that if I had come upon this book just by itself, I would have been entranced by its poise and simple wisdom. [4.5 stars]
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lovely novella,
By
This review is from: Walk On, Bright Boy (Hardcover)
Set in Medieval Spain, this story of a boy's first confrontation with political and religious corruption strives less for historical accuracy than for universal applicability. Written with lovely economy and sensitivity, it is reminiscent of a fable or of a young adult coming-of-age tale. At the same time, however, it is also complex in its exploration of human foibles and philosophies.The hero, a boy who is never named, is part of a settlement of Catholic Spaniards, who have recently replaced a population of Moors. One Moor remains to help the new residents manage an irrigation system, which the Moors have developed. The boy befriends the Moor, but after the disappearance of several small children, the Moor is demonized and accused of killing them. He is executed by a priest of the Inquisition who comes to the village for that purpose. While the first half a the story is largely philosophical, as it deals with the development of the friendship between the Moor and the boy, and the boy's coming to espouse a naturally revealed religion, rejecting the hypocrisies of organized religion, the second half of the story is fully dramatic. The boy stumbles upon the true murderer, witnesses the horrors of his deeds, and barely escapes. The depth of this novella along with the excitement of its plot makes it a very successful story that appeals to a various and large audience. I think most readers will appreciate the message of the tale, which encourages one to come to know spirituality through the careful study of nature and teaches one the value of WALKING in life, as a kind of meditative practice. As an atheist, I did not find the critique of organized religion that interesting, and I was not inspired to find God through nature. (I was inspired to do more walking and hiking. What the story tells us about walking is truly enlightening.) But there is another message to this tale, not as obvious as the main one, that I did find compelling. This second message involves the character of the Inquisitor. Although he knowingly executes an innocent man, he is more practical than corrupt. The condemnation of the Moor helps to unify the village, so we are told. A Machiavellian to be sure, the Inquisitor acts as though the greater good justifies some lesser evils. We don't believe this, but the boy at least understand the Inquisitor's motives and presents his actions from his point of view. We also learn the Inquisitor is himself executed later, when he becomes the victim of religious corruption. I couldn't help but like the Inquisitor. He is clever and careful. He thinks before he acts. He is curious, too, which makes him a fairly good listener. He lets the boy talk at the trial, when a more corrupt tyrant would have been more controlling. The boy also holds him in some esteem, although not without some ambivalence too. It is the Inquisitor who saves the boy from the murderer, whisks him away from the village (in which he is no longer welcome as the Moor's "special friend"), recognizes his intelligence, and becomes his mentor. If we like the narrator, the boy, and we do, we also like his two mentors indirectly, the Moor and the Inquisitor, who have helped the boy become the man who he is. So there is a sentimental story here that everyone will enjoy or appreciate, but there is also another story for more careful, sensitive readers, an alter-story not quite counter to the main one or "deconstructing" it in any way, but adjacent to it, adding depth and meaning. Walk On, Bright Boy is an excellent, much undersung, little novel that you will take great pleasure in reading. I recommend it highly.
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