The Walking Tour

by Kathryn Davis Narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers

Overview

It is the turn of this century. Two couples-businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr-have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant who's taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the book: we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge.

By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.

Editorial Reviews

Virginia Heffernan

Making your way through Kathryn Davis' enthralling and mystifying new novel, you might come to a place -- several places, actually -- where you lose sight of the clear narrative path. This reader did. The Walking Tour disorients: It sends you flipping pages back to see if you've missed major plot turns, like a violent crime or the introduction of a new character. But, like a hike through a rocky and vaguely menacing landscape, the novel, Davis' fourth, is also pulse-quickening and, at times, sublime.

This much is clear: Sometime in the late 20th century, two cyber-entrepreneurs, Bobby Rose and Coleman Snow, together with their unstable and artistic wives, Carole Ridingham and Ruth Farr, join a tour group and set off to see the Welsh countryside.

As the group paces around the Gower peninsula, however, tensions among the members -- sexual, professional and otherwise -- escalate so fast that the atmosphere turns supernatural. Ruth has mythological hallucinations; Carole, a famous painter, battles schizophrenia and mad bees; and an enigmatic Asian businessman, possibly in concert with Coleman, may or may not be plotting among ghosts to take over Bobby's business (a company responsible for a successful but insidious software called SnowWrite and RoseRead). In the eye of this storm is a tragedy -- two deaths -- that's left obscure until the novel's end. Even leaving aside the prominent mischief wrought by the masque-like roster of supporting characters, this is an elaborate narrative matrix.

Davis compounds her novel's complexity by having the tale of the tour narrated in fragments by the daughter of Bobby and Carole, Susan Rose. Susan sets out to construct her parents' story from scant evidence, which she shuffles like cards: court transcripts, Ruth's diary, Carole's postcards and the testimony of Monkey, a soothsayer from her own time. As she pieces things together, Susan also contends with the dangers of her 21st century world, a weird property-free dystopia with a Clockwork Orange ambience, dominated by Monkey's scary post-technology gang, the Strags.

The effect of the two intertwining narratives is an epistemological hide-and-seek in which the storytelling often conceals as much as it reveals. But it's well worth embracing the book's intricacies: Though Davis takes obvious pleasure in playing out her novel's dense setup, there is nothing rarefied about her precise and often epigrammatic prose. (Of Carole, she writes: "Really sad people never break your heart.") Davis makes frequent reference to Wordsworth, and, like the Romantic poets, she is keenly attuned to those moments in which the natural world has psychological reverberations. When Susan reflects on girls who seem to transform themselves from "baby savage to smooth operator without missing a beat," Davis elaborates: "They never know what it's like to hear in the rustling noise of summer's end the approach of a destiny so at odds with your parents' that it seems like a betrayal."

Here and throughout the novel, Davis expertly positions Susan between nostalgia and ambition. In The Walking Tour, she has created a profound and demanding narrative double-helix -- one that requires its characters to forge a future with an incomplete template from their pasts, just as the reader is required to leave clear and orthodox paths to enter Davis' heady wilderness.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Davis's fourth and thoroughly engaging novel (after Hell) is a witty blend of genres: mystery, courtroom drama, futuristic tale and a reworking of Welsh myth. In some unspecified year in the 21st century, when ideologies have transformed to the point where "the whole idea of edge...[has]...become a thing of the past," Susan R. Rose hides away on Maine's coast, in what was once her family home, reconstructing the events that led to her mother's disappearance and certain death during a walking tour through Wales, when Susan was 13. Equipped with letters and cards sent by her mother, a famous painter; a stack of unlabeled photos; a transcript from a wrongful death suit; and a laptop notebook her mother's oldest friend (and deepest rival) kept, Susan pieces together the spats, jealousies and sudden couplings of the tourists on a pilgrimage. Although she is at first alone, Susan's privacy is invaded by Monkey, a boy encamped nearby. He's a Strag, a member of a futuristic culture that is propertyless and thus lawless, "a triumph of the virtual." As in any good mystery, several possible suspects emerge with a variety of reasons to have killed Carole Ridingham Rose (even Monkey could hold a clue), yet Davis manages to keep this plot line alive while ingeniously weaving her imaginative settings. The playfulness of Davis's writing is irresistible. Laced with fairy tales, neologisms and poems, her prose is clever, sometimes dazzling, skating lightly over complex ideas that otherwise might bog down the narrative. Looking at an Andy Warhol painting, Susan's father says to her mother, "I like it. It's like money; it skips the middle step." One insistent theme surfacing in this highly original novel is the relationships between property and morality, between time and space. Davis's take on these subjects is intellectually rigorous, while the suspense remains satisfyingly taut. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Businessman Bobby Rose and software guru Coleman Snow anticipate that their new joint venture will make them wealthy and also revolutionize the reader/text environment (totally interactive interface!) but not that it will revolutionize society as well. Their wealth at the sale of the enterprise leads them and their wives on a less-than-idyllic walking tour of Wales with an oddly mixed ensemble, where a mysterious fatality occurs. From the future, Rose's daughter tries to unravel the events of the tour from her ruined estate, drawing on court records, journals, and an old laptop. Davis (Labrador, etc.) offers an unusual hybrid of sf, mystery, and literary fiction that keeps the reader guessing. One quibble: some intriguing facets of the future (e.g. "Strag culture") are hinted at too often before helpful elaboration kicks in. Otherwise, an excellent choice for all public libraries.--Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Davis, who seems equal parts Jane Austen and Isak Dinesen, offers a somber fable of longing, frustrated love, and guilt. Once again (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, 1993, etc.), Davis draws from a variety of genres (the mystery, the novel of manners, the speculative) to assemble her narrative: in part the attempt of a grown, and still despairing, daughter—while on a walking tour of Wales—to pierce the various mysteries surrounding the supposed death of her mother, a brilliant painter and a schizophrenic; and also in part a precise study of the duplicitous interactions among the painter, Carole, her husband, Bobby, and her supposed best friend, Ruth, a novelist, and Coleman, Ruth's husband. Davis has a keen ear for the brash chat of bright, uncertain, driven people. Bobby and Coleman have become rich as a result of "SnowWrite&RoseRead," a method that allows readers to interact aggressively with any electronic text, so that the space between reader and writer vanishes. All of this is described by Susan from the vantage point of some point in the 21st century, when the environment is unraveling, society diminishing, technology collapsing. In the decaying ruins of her parents' mansion, Susan sits, using Ruth's journals, her mother's letters, and the extensive inquest transcripts, to piece together what happened in Wales. What emerges is a series of betrayals: of Bobby by Coleman, of Carole by Ruth, and of Carole by the ever-bored and amorous Bobby. There is, at the end, a startling suggestion about Carole's fate, verging on the visionary. Along the way, Davis, in a prose that nicely mingles a cool, ironic tone with exact, perfect descriptions of landscapes and ruins,and of the charged interactions between characters, offers an acidic portrait of the money-mad present, as well as a provocative brief on art's place and purpose. A complex, tightly packed, ambitious work, by one of the most thoroughly original (and valuable) of contemporary writers.

From the Publisher

"Entrancing . . . every sentence uncoils with supple grace." The Los Angeles Times

“I cannot say how much I admire Kathryn Davis and her latest triumph, THE WALKING TOUR. The book is so beautifully written it takes one’s breath away — brilliant in every way, and often delightfully funny.”—Sigrid Nunez

"Kathryn Davis is brilliant."—Penelope Fitzgerald

“Davis’s approach to novel-writing is so original, and the results so magical, that trying to review her fiction in a thousand words on a tight deadline feels . . . doomed.”

Newsday

“A brilliantly dexterous novel” (NEW YORK TIMES), “so ambitious, so smart, so beautifully written that it is a pleasure to stand in its light.”

Mirabella

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177731018
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	02/11/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

part one

Quick & Dirty
The end of all things is nigh: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer. And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves, for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.
-I peter 4:7-8

Time passed. Or at least that's one way to get from there, my famous mother's infamous summer in Wales, to here, the ruined house and acreage she used to call home. "darling," begins a postcard of vine-draped Tintern Abbey in the moonlight, "as u can see, despite dr minton's dire warnings, i haven't left behind what bobby calls my horror vacui. the faces should be recognizable tho disguised as bees."
Her name was Carole Ridingham even after she married my father, Robert Rose, or Bobby, as he liked to be called, the way Napoleon preferred the Little Corporal. Bobby was the founder and original CEO of SnowWrite & RoseRead, a powerful man and hot, in the vernacular, unlike my mother, who eventually swelled up with the Change and never came back down. But she was a genius, it didn't matter. As for the faces (deliriously inked into any leftover space on the card, front and back), they include Ruth Farr's and her husband, Coleman's (the Snow of SnowWrite), and owe a lot to the portraits Blake drew of his friends, with flea heads, etc., that my mother made a point of seeing at the Tate while Bobby flirted with waitresses, and my so-called Aunt Ruth recorded her every move in her journal, and my so-called Uncle Coleman snapped photos covertly like a spy. The women's agendas may have been more overt, but don't be fooled, the men had agendas too, not the least of which was to figure out what to do with all the money they made five years earlier when they sold the business. Everyone has an agenda, me included, though we've been repeatedly reminded that the past's off-limits except to seers. Eyes straight ahead, let the dead wake the dead, as the saying goes.
The "dire warnings" refer to my mother's mental condition. At thirteen she was diagnosed borderline schizophrenic, and was put on drugs that made her thrust her tongue from her mouth in a way that looked less like a tongue than a nose, especially when she was trying to concentrate. My poor doomed mother-either sailing away from me across the meadow in her white beekeeping gloves and veil, in which case I couldn't see the tongue, or painting in the garden house she used as a studio, in which case I could but just barely, my view hampered by the gooseberry bushes outside the window and Bobby, who usually tried to keep me out. He said he was protecting her, but we all knew better; he was keeping her to himself, which I think was how he thought he could make sure she'd be his forever. Aside from the tongue, I almost never saw signs of what was referred to as "inappropriate behavior."
Later we'd have dinner prepared by Mrs. Koop, our humorless cook, and served by some cute-faced and inept maid-deluxe treatment even then. A long honey-colored table polished with beeswax and lit with beeswax candles, at each place one of the ever so subtly unmatched Blue Willow plates, and above the sideboard the plangent reds and golds and deep umbers of 492. My God: bouf en daube, mushrooms and pearl onions, petits pois, crème brûlée. In those days we ate like kings. Eventually 492 (the number of objects in the painting) got confiscated along with smaller and darker 53 that used to hang above my parents' bed. My mother said I was counting like a bank teller when I told her I couldn't find more than forty-nine.
I'll never forget the smell in that room: witch hazel, honey, wet dirt. Out the window the silver light of the Maine seacoast and on the bed Uncle Tony sitting with his head in his arms, sobbing. But that came later.

The idea for the walking tour began with Ruth Farr, whose urge to follow in the footsteps of the legendary Manawydan on his journey through Bronze Age Wales was yet one more doomed attempt to seem as interestingly compulsive as my mother. Ruth was always saying things like au fond I'm a dancer or fashion is my passion with a perfectly straight face, her idea this time having been to write the kind of historical novel where fact vanishes in a haze of myth and romance. A Fall of Mist it was to be called, or maybe The Fall of Mist, and based on an ancient tale about Manawydan found in the Mabinogion.
A plan doomed to fail, if ever there was one. Like you could ever hope to block out your own dull self and with it the present—a gang of Strag boys with measuring cups—going bang bang bang on your door. Sometimes four or five of them, sometimes only the one, banging away in that preposterous dust-caked wig . . .
Ruth was about the same age as Manawydan when he made the trip, though he was sent by his father and ended his days in the Otherworld, while Ruth & Co. bogged down on the Gower peninsula. Also, while Manawydan was known as one of the "Three Ungrasping Chieftains," and took discretion for the better part of valor, Ruth never had a problem appropriating someone else's property. Like many weak people, she was obsessed with the idea of fairness and, consequently, litigious. Without her, there'd have been no trial after the disaster at Gower.
According to Ruth's journal, she and Carole first met in Mrs. Hecht's second-grade class at Henry Clay Elementary School, where Carole (a new girl and good at memorizing) got the part of Miss Springtime even though she was fat and couldn't act, while string-bean Ruthie (the former apple of Mrs. Hecht's eye) was stuck playing a worm. Naturally they weren't friends. Actual friendship, if you could call it that, came thirty years later, when Carole's good-looking husband chose Ruth's clever husband to be his right-hand man, and the next thing Ruth knew she and Coleman were walking up a long driveway bordered on both sides by acres and acres of grass, and there was a large blond woman sloping toward them, at her heels a dog so tall and with legs so long and thin it looked like it was going to tip over.
"Heavens," the woman said, "little Ruthie Farr," but Ruth didn't actually recognize her childhood nemesis until the dog began to bark, and in place of a total stranger there was seven-year-old Carole Ridingham, eyes fierce with apprehension as Mrs. Hecht handed back the spelling tests. Odd, Mrs. Hecht remarked, they'd both made exactly the same mistake. C-A-W-T. You'd almost suspect . . . and she shook her head, unable to entertain such a sinister idea.
Meanwhile it was as if no time had passed at all: Carole and Ruth still couldn't take their eyes off each other, like serial holders of the same title vainly trying to figure out what they had in common. Maybe they were hampered by their jealousy, a key element under the circumstances. Nicest looks? Most famous? Best husband?
In those days Ruth did everything she could to play up her naturally snow white skin, ebony black hair, and blood red lips. Women wanted to look like dead young girls; it was the style, meaning another way to put Death on the wrong track. I remember being afraid of her, particularly a large beauty mark on her upper lip that I mistook for a bee, and I remember the frail hippie gardener doing a trick with a hollyhock to calm me down. The glowing pond, the humming bee boxes, the thrillingly insane smell of heliotrope. Out on what my mother called the piazza, in the good old summertime.
That's where they met up with Bobby. He stuck a drink in Coleman's hand and said there was more on the way. No one smoked; a drink was the best you could hope for after having been forced to watch your husband's jaw drop open at the sight of the girl you thought you'd seen the last of years ago, when her parents mercifully shipped her off to boarding school. Pudgy Carole Ridingham had turned into the kind of woman men put on a pedestal, though I'm sure it was less to worship than to observe safely from a distance.
"Cawing crows," Ruth wrote, "drifted through the vapid blue like cinders from the furnace of my jealous heart." Except really there was no cause for jealousy. What interested Uncle Coleman in my mother never had anything to do with sex; it had to do with power. He knew that if he could win my mother, he could win anything.
That was her talent, to make people feel that way—I should know.
But "vapid"? Ruth must have been thinking of someplace else.

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