Customer Reviews

The Walking Tour

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I really wouldn't care much what Kathryn Davis writes about- her prose is seamless and poetic, the mere way she puts words together is absolutely breathtaking. However the Walking Tour is also a fine story, filled with mystery, emotion, and mythology; it is a tour from the near future back to the past. Once you've begun these exquisitely tuned pages, you will not want it to end.

I had high hopes for this one and ended up pretty disappointed. Yes, the writing is wonderful, and I enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the walking tour--it's the only thing that kept me reading, actually. But Susan's apocalyptic near future is too mysterious. So is the reason she is only now trying to figure out what happened during her parents' trip. You can't help expecting that there is going to be some link--even only psychologically--between this trip gone wrong and the world gone wrong that Susan lives in--but no, there doesn't seem to be. We don't even know what happened to the surviving two members of this foursome after the trip. Nor do we have any idea who Susan is or how she changed because of what happened. I also disliked nearly all the walking tour participants. Ruth--blah, Bobby--yuck, Brenda--awful. And while Carole intrigued me, I was never convinced of her supposed instability except for the very bizarre postcards she sent to the poor 13-year-old Susan. In the accounts of the trip itself, she often seemed like the most understandable member of the group. And then Monkey--who was he, so menacing and perceptive and intrusive. And in the end, apparently an artist as great as Carole, as well. All in all I think it could have been a better read if Davis had provided just a bit more of a foothold in Susan's world.

Kathryn Davis's The Walking Tour is an ambitious exploration of the human urge to understand the present as the product of the past. Who writes the histories, tells the stories, makes the myths that humans embrace as they attempt to make sense of existence? The answer, this novel suggests, is that it's just ordinary people who do, ordinary people just like those of us reading the novel.

Susan Rose narrates Davis's complex mosaic of Welsh myth, contemporary painting, computer technology, and the timeless passions of human beings: greed, lust, love, envy, the urge to create art. Susan attempts to understand what caused the disastrous and fatal events that transpired during a walking tour of Wales undertaken by her parents, Bobby, a wealthy and powerful internet magnate, and Carole, a world-renowned painter who has struggled with schizophrenia her whole life; and their friends, Coleman Snow, Bobby's business partner, and Ruth Farr, his would-be novelist wife. Relying upon a variety of documentary sources--Ruth's digital journal, Coleman's vacation photos, Carole's picture postcards, and the transcript of a civil lawsuit that followed the tour--Susan struggles to piece together a coherent vision of what happened, why it happened, and what it means.

The novel's brilliance resides in Davis's adept handling of a complex narrative over which she never loses control. The story unfolds as a mystery of sorts, but what makes it memorable is how Davis places her readers in the same position as Susan Rose: we too must attempt to create a myth, tell ourselves a story, create a history that will account for the information we encounter. And that's no easy task. The novel invites misreadings and even at times may frustrate us. However, it would be quite a challenge for any reader to dig into her or his own past in the way Susan does without becoming frustrated and confused at times. Why should Susan's search be any easier for readers than it is for her?

The novel's use of Welsh mythology produces a resonance and depth to the story: Susan--and her readers--are doing no more and no less than the Welsh themselves when they created the myths that lent meaning to their own past and present. "The Walking Tour" does not serve up a bland, easy-to-digest Happy Meal but instead offers a feast. Readers will need to be alert and will have to concentrate on the text, but for those who do, the reward is a memorable experience. A terrific book for readers who welcome ambiguity and depth in their reading.

A confusing and, in the end, an unsatisfying read. Susan, the (now) adult daughter of a couple who have long since passed on, goes back through diaries, letters, and other things to sort out for herself (it seems) the day in Wales when her mother died (or was killed?). While the potential was there to give us a romping good mystery, Davis gets the reader all glopped up with unnecessary dialogue and seemingly missing information in our efforts to understand what is happening. The story surrounds two American couples, (with long sordid pasts with each other) the husbands are business partners, who take a trip to Wales for a walking tour of the region. There are other characters involved, a couple of single women, the couple who runs the tours (and the B&B where they are all staying), etc... but they are put forth in an unsatisfactory manner. Finally, there is a very vague undercurrent that suggests that Susan is living in some sort of anarchic or fascist state as, perhaps (we never know) a result of the computer work her father and the other man did. In any case, I agree with one reviewer of this novel who said, it might have been saved with some editing. I found it very hard to follow.

I am giving this book a better ranking than those immediately before me, though I basically agree with their criticisms. This book is indeed a mess, and fails far too often to tie up loose ends. However, the authors descriptive powers have stuck with me, both the Welsh walking tour, and the flashbacks to the US. It's very flawed, but still of interest.

People will be reading, studying and writing about Kathryn Davis for many, many years. Her work is playful, complex and exceedingly intelligent--incomparably precise. Part Henry James, part Virginia Woolf, completely original. The tone of this novel is so strange and original it is hard to describe, but its caginess is part of its massive appeal. Kathryn Davis will in the future be considered one of our most important novelists without a doubt.

Kathryn Davis's book is wiser about our future -- really our present -- than UNDERWORLD. Hers is a fiercely moral view, as strange as it is accessible, as innovative as it is traditional. It's a heady mix. Following to an extent the conventions of the upper-middle-class-white-philanderers-narrative, she raises questions of identity, text, and defends the not-quite-stabilizing, not-quite-liberatory imperative of art. A mysterious and -- yes! -- delightful read.

This book, although beautifully written, did not make sense. I was intrigued by the characters yet finished the book not understanding their motivations. I would have liked to know more about the narrator, Susan, and her life immediately after the fatal accident. Instead I felt like I was thrown into the middle of a story, with big gaps missing throughout. Perhaps some skillful editing would have made this more of a complete tale.

In my forty plus years of reading critically acclaimed fiction, I have only given up on two books in mid-read. "The Walking Tour" was not one of these, although I gave it careful consideration at about page 140. In the end, I found the novel to be an extremely laborious journey to a less than satisfying plot/conclusion; containing characters with whom I never really did empathize. The writing style and use of grammatical person appeared to me to be more "gimmicky" and disoriented then creative/innovative. I believe this was Ms. Davis' first novel. I hope her succeeding works prove more rewarding.

This book was recommended as a NY Times notable book which I trusted. The book reads like the first novel of a very "sensitive, artistic" under-grad writing student. There are a lot of pretentious descriptions and the hint at an interesting story but it is entirely unsatisfying and you realize just past the half way mark it's not getting better.