Four friends, two married couples, embark on a journey. Bobby Rose is a handsome charmer, a successful businessman; his partner Coleman Snow is more studious and reserved. Yet it's Snow's wife, Ruth, who is the brash looker; Bobby's wife Carole is a painter, aloof and mercurial--perhaps it would be more accurate to say a few steps away from madness. Together they go on a walking tour of Wales, where they are accompanied by a host of others, each with their own petty grievances and peccadilloes: cruel Paula, enigmatic Mr. Hsia, lovestruck Naomi, bitter tour leader Brenda. The trip, we come to understand, has ended in a moment of mysterious violence, though the exact nature of the moment, and who its victim was, are kept for the novel's end. Bobby and Carole's daughter Susan, now an adult, is trying to make sense of it, armed with various forms of documentary evidence: the postcards her mother sent her, Ruth's spiteful journal, the transcripts of the inquest that followed.
The Walking Tour is a book in which genres are smashed together so wildly it is elevated beyond them: the endless bickering of the walkers, and the forthcoming violence, seem lifted from an Agatha Christie novel. Susan's narration, though, has something of Margaret Atwood about it: she writes from a future world where an apocalyptic haze has taken over everything, crippling crops and livestock and sundering society. She's assisted, in a manner of speaking, by a nomadic "Strag" who calls himself "Monkey" who shows up at her door with a baby.
The haze, and the dissolute world it has covered, seem to have something to do with the mist of Wales, where fairies lurk menacingly, as if the atmosphere which stymied the walkers has spread to the entire world. (Ruth has written a novel called A Fall of Mist which her old frenemy Carole has panned, reigniting the rivalry between them.) And it seems to something to do, also, with the computer program which has made Bobby and Coleman rich: a program called, perhaps too cleverly, SnowWrite and RoseRead, which allows a reader to respond to what they are reading by making real-time changes. This computer stuff has a slightly anachronistic flavor that is surely inevitable--the book was published in 1999--and yet, funny to say, SnowWrite and RoseRead seems more or less like a primeval version of Google Docs. For Davis, the internet age threatens to dissolve boundaries, to work on the world like an enchantment only the arrogant think they can control.
If the world has ended, what does it matter what happened on the walking tour? What's Susan looking for? Her mother, maybe. Looking back, we're told, possesses its own dangers: "Maybe we're not supposed to look back because we're not supposed to horn in on places where we don't belong, like those time travelers in the old movies who do some inconsequential thing--eat a pomegranate, for instance--and ruin the future for everyone." Susan's investigation ends with a revelation that is shocking, otherworldly, and yet the stakes of the search have not been clear; the answers are elusive because the questions have never really been defined.
The Walking Tour is something to be admired, the way it bridges Welsh myth and Silicon valley, Christie and Atwood, past and future. Davis' prose earns its baroque flights because it's rooted in familiar language (see the way the phrase "horn in" anchors the allusion to Persephone in the passage above). But Labrador, which amazed me when I read it last year, succeeds because even at its strangest it is animated by the single-minded obsession the narrator has for her older, more popular sister. The Walking Tour has too many characters, and none are very thoroughly sketched, except perhaps for Carole. The fragments don't come together because that strong viewpoint is missing.
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