Book of the week
Zoe, a comparatively disorganised, dreamy artist has a very limited budget and no trail guides, and has to call on her uncompleted massage training and semi-qualified art skills to pay for food and accommodation massaging weary walkers and drawing likeable cartoons. Martin, on the other hand, is a very precise, organised engineer, with maps, GPS, compasses, guide books and a lot of equipment, which he loads into a pull-along, one-wheeled cart he has built and is trialling for potential sale. They couldn’t be more dissimilar and of course dislike each other at first sight. But the trail, with its ups and downs, stops and starts, reflects not just their growing relationship, but also their personal journeys overcoming the heavy emotional burdens each is carrying.
Graeme Simsion, of the laughout-loud The Rosie Project fame, writes from Martin’s less humorous point of view, and his wife, thriller writer Anne Buist writes Zoe’s. There is a little of The Rosie Project‘s Don Tillman in Martin, who lacks EQ and is a bit fixed in his views, while Zoe is easier to like. But the voices of each character are surprising alike, given they are written by two different people. Maybe their familiarity of husband and wife has led to an appearance of speaking with one voice, but Zoe’s and Martin’s thought processes run along similar lines.
Simsion and Buist have walked the Camino trail twice, and there is a wealth of detail for anyone thinking of following in their footsteps. They describe the huge variety of basic hostels with bed bugs and barely edible meals followed by swish hotels and gourmet degustation, and everywhere wine, especially good wine, by the bucket-load. Of course, walking 25km every day helps keep the kilos off, so they can eat as much as they like and moderate their drinking only by the need to get up early for the next day’s trek. Along the way, we meet a cast of eclectic characters, marvel at the endurance tests, and cheer Martin and Zoe to find each other again after going their separate ways several times. It’s a bit like a modern-day hero’s journey, where the characters have to overcome numerous obstacles and discover their real purpose before they’re allowed to win the prize, and it’s all the more enjoyable for it. – Felicity Price