If it hadn't been a choice for book club, I would have abandoned this book within the first twenty pages. It was all too depressing and annoying. Which would have been a shame as it did become more interesting as Ray and Moth struggle along the South West Coast Path. And particularly because the north coast of Cornwall is so familiar, having spent a week there for 17 of the last 19 years. So the book did bring back lots of memories for me.
At the start of the book, they took some inspiration from Mark Wallington's "500 Mile Walkies", a far more humorous affair. But he was a lot younger than our pair in their fifties. Raynor Winn's story is one of hardships overcome, I have to say they did so well to keep going. One of the best things in the book is about the people they meet along the way. The backpackers, the man renting a farmhouse, even the man who told them about the ice cream van. That has always been the same for us, albeit in a more transient fashion.
But our narrator can sometimes slip into awful pretentious prose: "Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death. At the edge of existence". Then in the Prologue "We had walked 243 miles...... only another 387 to go". That is the 630 miles of the coast oath, but what about the bus they had already taken. I just didn't believe everything I was reading.
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