This is the second volume in Tim Pears' West Country Trilogy. I read the first book (The Horseman) a couple of weeks ago and I mean to read the third one soon. At the end of The Horseman the central character - an adolescent boy named Leo Sercombe - has been severed from Lottie, his girl friend, by the ramifications of the English class system and driven into exile by his own family.
As this book opens Leo is making his solitary way across rural England in 1912, without a home, food or money. He falls in (and subsequently, out) with a party of gypsies whose idiosyncratic life is exuberantly described. There are also vivid pictures of life in a struggling tin mine, on a bleak sheep farm and on the road with a kind but eccentric tramp. From time to time we get a glimpse of how things are progressing for Lottie and oblique hints from the outside world of certain movements and events that are more meaningful to us than they could be to Leo: suffragettes, the arms race between Britain and Germany, the belief that international trade would make war impossible.
I realise that I've broken one of my own rules by giving away fragments of the plot but I couldn't see a way to avoid it in this case and I haven't spilled any more beans than would a glance at the dust jacket.
Like its predecessor this is a beautifully written, heart-breaking novel.
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