Review: When to Walk

When to Walk
Rebecca Gowers
(Canongate )

All families are psychotic, it is true, but we spend so much time moving, keeping busy, seeking external stimulation, our heads so crowded with various noises that we don’t stop to notice it. Ramble doesn’t move very fast. She’s got a bad hip, a dodgy pelvis, and she’s partially hearing-impaired, so she can’t but notice the loopiness around her.

Ramble’s husband Constantine has disappeared, and according to her downstairs neighbour, Mrs Shaw (whose name conjures up an image that is deeply incongruous with her character), he’s tampering with electricity meters under the tutelage of Mr Shaw. Ramble isn’t sure she wants to deal with it, and anyway, she’s got an article on ice sculpture festivals due for a glossy in-house magazine, for whom she writes travel articles about places she’s never been. She doesn’t exactly want to care, preferring to follow more interesting tangents: unfunny Victorian humour, Browning and his detractors, nineteenth-century tabloids, and looking up word etymologies on the computers in the local library.

She is less interested in her husband’s location than she is in a story Mrs Shaw told her that ended with ‘a perfect lie’. She is curious about the neighbourhood oddballs, the number of apparently disabled pigeons, wonders if her grandfather Alphonso was actually a homosexual, and can’t figure out why her grandmother doesn’t appear concerned about what happened to a German Jewish family she lived with before the war. Ramble is obsessive, yes, but lacks determination about any one particular thing. She is, perhaps, as she describes, a sort of ‘autistic vampire’.

Her daily rambles are laboured and short: the pub, the library, demented chats with her ever-deteriorating grandmother, Stella, occasional visits with the generous-hearted Johnson Pike, and no-nonsense email exchanges with her so-straight-she’s-eccentric epigrapher friend Beata. Within this small circuit, Ramble finds herself, not exploring the big world out there, but waiting to see what happens next on the tiny map of her world. You can go out and look for the crazy in the world, but if you stay in one place for long enough, the crazy will always find you.

Rebecca Gowers has a twisted imagination, bolstered by a bout of total immersion in Victoriana. Sometimes, When To Walk feels like a brain dump for all the demented thoughts that may have come to her while writing The Swamp of Death, her previous book, a non-fiction work about Victorian criminals. Sometimes the story lacks strength, feels like a connect-the-dots picture for disconnected thoughts – but ultimately, that is its strength. Ramble’s inner universe, her obsessions, the complexity of her character, of her discontented sense of place and self makes her an unusually sympathetic narrator; it is in the contorted, perverted world of literary grotesques that we find our closest kin.