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Summary
Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINSTON GRAHAM HISTORICAL PRIZE 2018 The beautiful, questing second novel in Tim Pears' acclaimed West Country trilogy. Two teenagers, bound by love yet divided by fate, forge separate paths in pre-First World War Devon and Cornwall Lonely and grieving for her exiled best friend, thirteen-year-old Lottie feels a prisoner. Her only solace is her study of the natural world around her father's estate: the strange profusion of its plants, the beauty and brutality of its predators, its mysterious dances of life, death and survival.Grazing on berries and sleeping in copses, Leo travels alone through the wild, strange tapestry of the West Country towards Penzance. But a wanderer is never alone for long - and when the gypsy waggons rattle into view, Leo is drawn into a colourful and dangerous world far beyond his imagination.
Author Notes
Tim Pears is the author of nine novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), In a Land of Plenty (made into a ten part BBC series), Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize 2011, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011) and, most recently , The Horseman , the first book in this trilogy. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children.timpears.com
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This elegiac second novel in Pears's West Country Trilogy (after The Horseman) movingly depicts life in the English countryside on the eve of the First World War. Leo Sercombe, banished from the estate where he worked, travels through the West of England seeking relatives, but the need for food and money set him drifting among the local transients, shepherds, and tramps. Leo is a quiet, likeable protagonist; his boyishness, loneliness, and consistent wonder at the natural world enliven the detailed accounts of his everyday labors and odd jobs he gets to keep himself alive. The narrative alternates between Leo and Lottie Prideaux, Leo's former lover and the daughter of the owner of the estate where he formerly worked. Lottie, too, is isolated and unmoored, frustrated by her nebulous position between adult and child. The novel spans several quiet years during which the teens grow older without any communication or expectation of reunion, and some readers will find the lack of narrative momentum frustrating. But this majestic, foreboding novel paints an emotional portrait of a land on the cusp of turmoil. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The second instalment of Pearss West Country trilogy, set in the run-up to the first world war, is testament to his uncommon skill Last January The Horseman, the first instalment in Tim Pearss West Country trilogy, introduced us to young Leo Sercombe, a Devon carters son with an exceptional affinity for horses. Set in the early 20th century, it is a gorgeously hypnotic paean to rural England, recreating in its myopic focus, languid pace and spare prose a way of being in the world that is all but unrecoverable to our hyperconnected modern minds. Unfolding slowly, it saves its punch for the final pages when Leos friendship with Lottie Prideaux, the local landowners daughter, at last brings disaster down upon him. The Wanderers continues the story of both Leo and Lottie, and with little in the way of conventional plot to drive the narrative, it is largely the question of whether they will find one another again, and how, and when, that pulls the reader along. That it does so, without question, is testament to Pearss uncommon skill. It is no mean feat for a writer to eschew the tyranny of cliffhangers, coincidences and plot twists, instead trusting the reader to stay with them for the sheer pleasure of the writing and the interest in the world conjured up. It requires unwavering confidence; a consistency of pace and vision that must be there from the outset, and must not falter; and something withheld, however subtly, that creates an itch to turn the page. His writing slips between gorgeously sonorous Old Testament rhythms and clipped, verbless sentences None of this is to say that nothing happens in The Wanderers. Having been driven from his home, Leo (usually referred to as the boy) lives for a time with Gypsies, then with a hermit, and works in a Dartmoor mine and on a farm. Lottie pursues a fascination for anatomy, endures her fathers remarriage, and unwillingly prepares herself to be sent to Germany to be finished. Slowly, incrementally, Pears sets the stage for the final book in the trilogy. In common with many contemporary novelists who are drawn to describe the relationship between men and landscape for instance, Cynan Jones and Ben Myers Pears seems to owe a debt to Cormac McCarthy. His writing slips between gorgeously sonorous Old Testament rhythms and clipped, verbless sentences (He ate the meat and bread crouched upon the rock in his fine suit, and beheld the horse below and knew not whether he was blessed or cursed. Wealthy or poor. Free or bound. Joyful or desolate. In time he might discover). Similar, too, is the almost anthropological detachment of the narrator and a wordless unsentimentality that nevertheless becomes highly emotionally charged as masculine vulnerability is revealed in spite of the characters best efforts. But McCarthy devotees need not be concerned about encountering some kind of pastiche in these pages: The Horseman and The Wanderers are much gentler and less elemental, and their bucolic, prewar, West Country world could not be more different from the harsh landscapes of the American west. It is the first world war, of course, that hangs over these books, and which Pears so deftly employs (and avoids). Its impossible to set a book in 1912 without fencing in some way with its shadow, but he does not rush us towards it too precipitately. Instead, the coming conflict is foreshadowed here and there, but in the subtlest of ways: They each stood and watched whatever it was growing larger, approaching them through the air. Bearing down upon them, flying low and fast along the ridge, straight as arrows. Leo felt his knees weaken the two mute swans rose and flew over them, a yard or two above their heads. The Wanderers is peppered with moments of awestruck wonder at the natural world, often related to birds, for Leo is a noticer, and in his own way, a thinker. Their effect is to remind us that, just a century ago, life for ordinary people was full of mysteries that could not be resolved by typing a keyword into Google. This meant that experience itself thought, curiosity, imagination was differently textured, something that many writers of books set in the past fail to take into account when they remove modern technology but ignore the phenomenological implications of a world without it. For instance, there were far fewer mirrors; news travelled slowly, if at all; many people journeyed no further than a few miles from their home, few expected to move faster than a horse could carry them. In both this book and its forerunner, the care that has been taken with historical research is obvious; but it is this deeper, subtler layer of reconstruction that sets these moving novels apart. - Melissa Harrison.
Kirkus Review
A teenage boy scrapes a living roaming the southern counties of pre-World War I England as a girl he loves drifts toward maturity in surroundings of insulated privilege.Time passes with slow deliberation in this restless second volume of the West Country trilogy as Pears (The Horseman, 2017, etc.) maintains his commitment to the seasonal and laboring round of a bygone era. The novel picks up where Volume 1 closed, with Leo Sercombe cast out from his childhood home, beaten and bereft. Near starvation, he's rescued by a gypsy family whose adoption develops into a kind of enslavement as Leo works off his debt, initially with chores, later--when reunited with a stunning white colt and using his remarkable equestrian skills--by enhancing the betting in an important race. Meanwhile, Lottie, the 14-year-old daughter of Lord Prideaux, progresses toward adulthood, attending the Derby (an annual British horse race) and developing a passion for biology. Leo's peregrinations serve as a lens through which Pears presents a succession of impoverished vistas--ruined mines, mean farms--and a minutely observed landscape in which the boy scrounges work, learns some skills, makes a few friends, and is robbed of his magical horse. Weather, wildlife, and rural practices are delivered in detail, from how to butcher a deer to the best response when an owl lands on your wrist, talons first. Avoiding conventional plot developments, pulled along instead by the gravity of survival and impending history, the novel closes with a glimpse of 1915, of war and the irreversible social disruption seeping into this panorama split between Leo's poverty and Lottie's luxury.Episodic, instructive, occasionally resonant, this is slow, lambent fiction that pays unsentimental tribute to ways of being now disappeared from the land.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In this powerful, episodic sequel to The Horseman (2017), Leo Sercombe starts his journey west in June 1912, at the point the first story ended. He is still a teen when he's cast off the Prideaux estate in shame, the result of his love for Miss Charlotte (Lottie), the master's daughter; once a promising young horseman, now merely the son of a carter (the driver of a team of animals), Leo takes to the road, badly beaten, alone, and without resources. Typical of coming-of-age stories, Leo gains manhood and wisdom on his journey, but this deeply engaging rural portrait also captures the essence of England's West Country in the pre-WWI years. The gentle, lyrical style invites readers to wander, as the setting assumes the role of a character, alongside the people Leo meets gypsies, copper miners, and an elderly homeless man. At the same time, Pears subtly introduces the world's brutality in scenes depicting the butchering of a deer, fistfights, cheating, and instances of injustice and poverty all dark notes set against the peaceful setting. As Leo travels to Penzance, Lottie finds solace in her studies (especially anatomy) on the estate. Her stubborn curiosity, refusal to conform to a woman's role, and reverence for science are reminiscent of Alma Whittaker in Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things (2013). Thought provoking, homespun, and poignantly drawn from the earth (like Rae Meadows' I Will Send Rain, 2016), this second in a trilogy is an unforgettable treasure and will have readers eagerly anticipating the finale.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
This second volume of Pears's "West Country Trilogy" picks up where The Horseman ends. Young Leo Sercombe has grown up among the workers on the estate of Lord Prideaux. Now exiled from that place and from Lord Prideaux's daughter, and in the period slipping into World War I, Leo takes up with a band of wanderers who "live in an ever on-rolling now." He travels through Devon, living off the land, learning, and above all, observing. He is introduced to the natural world and develops his talent for working with horses, including one exceptional horse that he races to victory on occasion. Meanwhile, there are brief scenes of Lottie Prideaux still on her father's estate, learning some of the same lessons as Leo. By the end of this volume the rumble of war is still being felt only at the edges, seemingly setting up the concluding volume. For those who have ever wondered just how far style can carry a novel, this can serve as Exhibit A. From Thomas Hardy through D.H. -Lawrence to John Cowper Powys, the mystical relationship between man and an atavistic nature has served as a crucial component in their work and style. VERDICT Pears's prose ballad manages to make the story, if not new, at least as bracing and possibly as threatening as a Devon stream.-Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.