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 
I recently went to a talk by these two because the topic was coercive control and it seemed like a good opportunity to find out more about it. I was never going to read the book, but I might have written up the author talk.
The main theme of the talk was that they had written a book (in the same alternating PoV style) way back when and weren’t they clever to have identified the behaviours that we now all these years later identify as coercive control?
From the excerpts they read as a tag team, it seemed heavy- handed with cardboard characterisation. (Male=bad; female=good.) I was disappointed because Buist is (was?) a psychiatrist and I expected a more nuanced understanding of why some people develop an excessive need for control over others.
Questions from the audience included one who said that ‘the police don’t do anything’ which always makes me cross because it discourages people from going to the police when they need to. But it went uncorrected…