BEYOND THE SALT PATH

Five Other Walks of Recovery & Redemption

The Salt Path controversy was all anyone both inside and outside of publishing wanted to talk to me about about this week. However true or false the allegations against Raynor Winn prove to be, I have found myself feeling increasingly uneasy about the gleeful pile-on we’ve witnessed. I’ve lost count of the number of commentators queuing up to say words to the effect of: “I always knew there was something dodgy about that book”. Whatever the controversy, there will never be a shortage of apparent wisdom after the event.

For the record, I have done three public in-conversation events with Raynor Winn about her books, and on those occasions also met her husband Moth. Call me naïve but I never found any reason to doubt her, or the veracity of the narratives in her compelling and well-written books. The one aspect of their story that has given me pause for thought (because I have a little skin in the game) is Moth’s remarkable rebounding health in the face of his CBD (cortico-basal degeneration) diagnosis. For after the same diagnosis, my own mother-in-law rapidly declined and died from the same awful disease for which there is no medical treatment. This first-hand experience makes me fervently hope for the sake of other sufferers of this terrible disease that this part is not a fiction. That said, medical miracles do happen.

When it comes to the trustworthiness of non-fiction, I understand that Raynor Winn’s legions of readers might feel let down. But let’s be clear we are talking about a single case to prove against a single book (and two, potentially three sequels). This one case does not mean that we suddenly have reason to doubt the narratives of the many other ‘redemptive journey’ memoirs that have captivated, entertained, moved and comforted readers and in many cases, made them feel seen. We need such books, and nothing about The Salt Path controversy makes me think any differently.

In this spirit, here are my five recommendations for other recent books about walks of recovery and redemption.

“The Parallel Path” by Jenn Ashworth (Sceptre)

Acclaimed novelist Jenn Ashworth emerged from lockdown with a compulsion to get out and walk; not in the short, circular close-to-home manner permitted during the pandemic, but in a long, straight line. So she set her map and began walking across the north of England solo, from west to east via Alfred Wainwright’s celebrated Coast to Coast route. She was guided along the way by Wainwright’s somewhat cantankerous instructions, and by bolstering daily letters from her friend Clive, facing an epic journey of his own after a terminal cancer diagnosis.

However this enthralling multi-layered blend of memoir and travelogue is much more than the story of Ashworth’s walk through the north country landscapes through which she passes, though those are beautifully evoked. It also becomes a kind of pilgrimage inwards as Ashworth reflects on life, death, bereavement, motherhood, being a northerner, friendship, what it means to care for someone, and be cared for in turn; the limitations of one body and a single lifespan. I felt I was walking with her, stride for stride.

“Sarn Helen: A Journey Through Wales, Past, Present and Future” by Tom Bullough (Granta)

During the long hot summer of 2020, Welsh novelist Tom Bullough set out to walk Sarn Helen - Helen’s Causeway, the old Roman road which runs from the south of Wales to the north - in a time of pandemic and the context of his own intense anxiety about the climate emergency. As he traces the route of the long, wandering line of this ancient path, he builds a portrait of his nation’s past, present and future and considers how his ancestors’ relationship with the natural world - especially during the post-Roman period and the so-called ‘age of saints” - might inform our own.

Threaded through his immersive, meditative account of this journey are Bullough’s conversations with climate scientists, and the story of his own climate activism, as he reflects on what the future of Wales - that diminutive nation so often used as a comparative measure - can tell us about our wider future, and how we might respond to a threat “so unconceivably vast that, really, it is only a very small scale that it can seem to mean anything at all”.

“High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland” by Tom Parfitt (Headline)

In an enthralling blend of memoir, travelogue and history, Parfitt - formerly the Moscow correspondent of The Times charts his 1000-mile walk across the mountainous North Caucasus, from Sochi on the Black Sea to Derbent on the Caspian. He explains how he turned to his love of walking as both a source of recuperation and recovery, in the hope of laying to rest the ghosts that haunted him after reporting first-hand on the Beslan school siege of 2004 in which more than 300 people - over half of them children - perished.

Still suffering recurring nightmares, he journeyed on foot across the Caucasus , traversing its many political and tribal fault lines and the shoulders of Elbrus, Europe’s highest mountain, in a bid both to recuperate and to better understand the deep anger felt by the region’s peoples -including the Chechens - at Russia. I found it deeply illuminating about a region I previously knew little of, and also profoundly moving.

“I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain” by Anita Sethi (Bloomsbury)

In 2019, writer and journalist Anita Sethi was on a train from Liverpool to Newcastle when she became the victim of a race hate crime. After reporting what had happened to the police, she experienced panic attacks, and a crushing sense of claustrophobia which made her long for wide open spaces, just as she did as a child growing up in inner-city Manchester. So took to the Pennine hills, intent on travelling alone and without fear, and determined to reclaim the landscapes of her native land in defiance of the racist who had told her to “get back on the banana boat”.

Combining memoir with the travel and nature writing, the book is cleverly structured as an activist journey around the human body, from Mouth (“Speaking Up” & Bearing Witness”) to Feet (“Walking and Witnessing). And the fact that the Pennine Hills are popularly known as the backbone of Britain inspires a meditation on what it means to have backbone – what we mean by strength and what people need in the way of social support structures.

“The Crossway” by Guy Stagg (Picador)

After suffering years of severe mental illness, writer Guy Stagg set out on an epic journey on foot from Canterbury to Jerusalem, in the fervent hope that the 5500km walk along medieval pilgrim paths would help him find a measure of healing.

Travelling alone, and without support, Stagg had to rely on shelter provided by churches, monasteries and nunneries en route. As he struggled to escape the past and walk towards recovery, he faced down numerous demons along the way; as well as getting caught up in violent snowstorms, demonstrations in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, and a terrorist attack. Reminiscent of the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, “The Crossway” is both a compelling travelogue, and a thought-provoking meditation on what it means to have faith in our turbulent contemporary world. I also recommend Stagg’s “The World Within” - just published - a profound exploration of the impulse to retreat and withdraw from the world.