Because I’m learning Spanish, I have met several people who have ‘done’ the Camino de Santiago and have taken up Spanish before embarking on the journey. They seem to have undertaken it for various reasons: some because they are already seasoned walkers, others as a bucket list challenge, and only one or two for religious reasons. (I must confess that it holds no appeal for me whatsoever.)
In Two Steps Forward, the two main characters Zoe and Martin had different reasons for undertaking the walk. Zoe was from America and imbued with New Age flakiness, while British-born Martin was an engineer, keen to road-test a walking trailer that he had invented. Zoe’s husband had died only a matter of weeks previously, and faced with unexpected shock that the family company was bankrupt, she abruptly left everything to visit an old school friend in France and undertake the France-Spain leg of the Camino. Martin had undergone a bitter divorce, leaving his daughter Sarah torn between her loyalties with both parents. Martin and Zoe keep running into each other on the Camino, neither particularly liking the other, and as you might expect, romance buds between them. But they each have ‘issues’ which they need to resolve before they can establish a relationship, a fact that becomes clearer as they travel together. Its ending leaves scope for a second volume, which I see appeared as Two Steps Onward in 2021.
The book is written by husband-and-wife team Graeme Simsion (of The Rosie Project fame) and Anne Buist, who writes erotic fiction as well as crime novels, including Medea’s Curse (which I reviewed here). It is told in alternating first- person narrative chapters, Martin’s chapter written by Simsion, Zoe’s by Buist. The clash of American/British, heart/head viewpoints is rather stereotypical, and I’m not sure that the narrative voices between the alternating chapters differed enough to know instantly ‘whose’ chapter you were reading.
I often reflect that my response to a book is largely framed by the book that I read immediately preceding, and in this case Two Steps Forward suffered badly from being compared with Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Simsion and Buist’s book is a light-weight little thing, with flat writing and ultimately rather trivial. Frankly, I wouldn’t bother.
My rating: 6/10
Read because: CAE bookgroup choice.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 