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Chargement... A Long Walk to Wimbledon (1978)par H. R. F. Keating
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. H. R. F. Keating is an author who's been on my radar for a while. He wrote mainly crime fiction and books about crime fiction, perhaps most well know for his Inspector Ghote series and Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, but he also wrote one novel which is probably best described as science fiction, A Long Walk to Wimbledon published in 1978. Thanks to Bloomsbury, this novel is now back in print along with most of Keating's crime fiction. A Long Walk to Wimbledon is set in a London where society has almost completely broken down. Large parts of Oxford Street have been reduced to rubble, packs of feral dogs roam the parks and the remaining inhabitants of London have withdrawn into small communities within the city. Nobody travels to other parts of the country or even to other parts of London; food, clothing, water and power are found locally or not at all. So Mark is surprised to hear his telephone ring one day and to hear the voice of his mother-in-law on the other end of the line; even more surprised when she tells him that his ex-wife, Jasmine, is dying and that Jasmine's dying request is to see Mark. Mark is unable to bring himself to refuse to go despite his fears of what he may encounter on the journey, so he sets out to walk from Highgate in North London, to Wimbledon across the river in order to get to Jasmine before she dies. A Long Walk to Wimbledon is a book about Mark's journey, both in the sense that it describes the physical obstacles he has to overcome but also that it shows us Mark's thoughts and outlook and how his forced journey challenges those. We never really find out what happened to leave London and (one assumes) the rest of the country in this state but the clues Keating gives seem to indicate that the collapse of society was caused by nothing supernatural or other-worldly, just normal, everyday people losing the desire to make society work. "Now he knew with conviction that what lay ahead for him beyond any conjuring away was uncertainty. The territory he had pledged himself to make his way through was not simply a dangerous world. The journey facing him was not just a long walk where he would have to keep constantly alert, but which if he managed so much he might reasonably hope to complete with no more than some bad scares. No, ahead, he knew now, lay anything. His world was at the mercy of the unmotivated. Perhaps it had really been so for years. Perhaps that was what gradually, over as much as a century even, had been creeping up from beneath into the secure organised society which he had been brought up to believe he was living in and was entitled to live in his whole life long. The unmotivated." A well-written, thought-provoking book that has definitely left me wanting to read more of Keating's books. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Appartient à la série éditoriale
Fiction.
Thriller.
HTML:First published in 1978, this is a London where the worst has happened. There have been riots, huge uncontrolled fires, outbreaks of savage looting, artillery battles, mass flights. The great city lies three parts deserted, open to marauding gangs and beast-wild individuals, its highways and landmarks tumbled like ruined temples. To Mark, comparatively safe up in less troubled Highgate, there comes a message that his estranged wife is dying over in Wimbledon, right across on the far side of the dangerous bowl of the devastated city. Reluctant almost to sticking-point, he sets out to go to her. His journey is a story of adventure through the ruins. His immediate business is the simple one of pressing on through all the debris, always driven because he knows that Jasmine will die soon. He may never get there: he may be killed by idiotic accident, torn to pieces by the packs of wild dogs, trapped in one of the communes that within their stockades have established their own ruthlessly puritanical disciplines. But the difficulties and the dangers teach him lessons as he struggles onwards. He learns from the past. If it was drink, drugs and the dolce vita that had done for his wife, had not something similar destroyed the city too? He learns about the present amid its hazards. And he learns, as he comes at last to the bleak end of his Iong walk, lessons for a just possible future. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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It's an interesting feature of the book that the social collapse has not been precipitated by any external factors: it seems to be an internal collapse of society with minor riots leading to major rioting and then open warfare in the streets of London. The implication is that things may be better elsewhere but this is not certain. And perhaps this says a lot about the time when the book was written, the late 1970's, which was certainly a period when Britain seemed to be going nowhere fast.
Written in 1978, this book shows its age a little when it comes to race. While treated very sympathetically, the Indian Dr Satpathi, who Mark meets on his journey, seems very much a stock character from the TV of the period. And the demonisation of non-whites as 'tropicals', perhaps reflecting worries over racial tension in the 1960's and 70's, reads a little oddly in 2013. But otherwise a decent read. ( )