The Walk Home: A Novel (Vintage International), by Rachel Seiffert
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The Walk Home: A Novel (Vintage International), by Rachel Seiffert
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Stevie hasn't set foot in his home town for years, and he can’t decide whether to let his family—what’s left of them, anyway—know he’s back. He wasn’t the first to cut and run—in their own ways, his mother, his father, and his uncle all fled before he did—but should he be the first to come home? Moving between Stevie’s life as a construction worker in present-day Glasgow and the story of his parents when they were young, The Walk Home is a heartbreakingly powerful novel about the risks of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Gripping, haunting and, ultimately, hopeful, here is a piercingly honest story about the journey home—and the people there waiting for you.
The Walk Home: A Novel (Vintage International), by Rachel Seiffert- Amazon Sales Rank: #2304953 in Books
- Brand: Seiffert, Rachel
- Published on: 2015-06-23
- Released on: 2015-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .40" w x 5.20" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 304 pages
From Booklist When one’s own home town ceases to feel like home, trouble sets in. And trouble, or more precisely, the Troubles, have been displacing Graham and his family since his grandfather, Papa Robert, was forced out of Ireland a generation ago. Although Graham and his extended family now live in Glasgow, he holds fast to the family pride as a drummer for a marching band. It is during Graham’s first annual Protestant Orange Walk that he meets Lindsey, a young runaway from Northern Ireland, and it’s not long before Lindsey is pregnant. After Stevie is born, Graham tries to help Lindsey improve their lives, but when a militant loyalist gets interested in the band, Graham falls back into that life, a decision that will destroy his marriage, estrange his parents, and alienate his young son. In this vividly atmospheric, achingly poignant, and sharply provocative tale, British novelist Seiffert (Afterwards, 2007), whose many honors include an E. M. Forster Award, sharply appraises the tenuous bonds that draw families together and the deeply held convictions that can drive them apart. --Carol Haggas
Review “A brilliantly compelling and powerful work, told in beautiful, lean prose.” —The Economist“Against a backdrop of religious and political divisions, Seiffert’s even prose is melodious.” —The New Yorker“Intelligent and sophisticated.” —The Times (London) “Seiffert continues to go from strength to strength. . . . As flinty and gritty as its characters and their vernacular. . . . Seiffert’s tragedy grips while it disturbs and its emotional punch makes it worth persevering until her bitter end.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune“A sort of fictional reportage illuminating the life and work of those invisibly holding our cities together. . . . Glimpses into the new Glasgow bring both the book and the city to life.” —Financial Times “A brave, beautiful novel.” —The Guardian (London) “Seiffert’s ear for speech patterns seems as excellent as you’d expect from a novelist brought up bilingually. . . . [She has a] finely tuned sense of the idea of home in all its seductiveness and fragility. . . . Written with great skill and control.” —Sydney Morning Herald “The Walk Home may take place in Glasgow, but it is universal in its narrative pursuit. And the sparse emotion of the story’s ending will leave a crack in even the most impassive of hearts.” —Toronto Star “Riveting. . . . Further proof of Seiffert’s enviable talents as a writer. . . . While the conflict in which her characters are trapped might be ugly, the men and women are captivating.” —The Daily Telegraph (London) “Deftly drawn and perceptively observed.” —Daily Mail (London) “An engrossing domestic drama. . . . Seiffert’s writing is both tightly controlled and almost orchestral in its sweep. You feel every emotion deeply. . . . A rare novel.” —Irish Independent “Exquisitely pared down prose by a writer who really feels for her characters and the tainted lives they are living.” —The Herald (Scotland) “Deeply moving. . . . As heart-breaking as it is heart-warming, this delicate and powerful novel will stay with you long after the final page.” —Irish Examiner “Full of intelligence, heart and compassion. . . . A tale of the urban working classes; where they draw their strengths from, their history and where they find dignity. . . . Seiffert has a superb ear for language.” —Scotland on Sunday “Thought-provoking. . . . Seiffert illuminates historical and political issues through harrowing personal drama.” —Publishers Weekly “Energetic, persuasive and lively . . . Seiffert’s brio and talent are once again amply on display.” —Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Rachel Seiffert’s first novel, The Dark Room, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize, and was the basis for the acclaimed motion picture Lore. She was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003; in 2004, Field Study, her collection of short stories, received an award from PEN International. Her second novel, Afterwards, was long-listed for the 2007 Orange Prize, and in 2011 she received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been published in eighteen languages. Formerly of Glasgow, she now lives in London with her family.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Walking through some dark places... By Keris Nine When issues related to the working class communities of Glasgow are tackled - in my experience more often in cinema than literature (in Red Road, in the films of Ken Loach and Peter Mullan) - it's to depict sordid situations of drugs, alcohol, poverty, abuse, deprivation and street violence (Mullan's brilliant 'Neds' being the hardest-hitting of all). Rachel Seiffert's The Walk Home deals with similar ground-level issues, but from a perspective of a community that rarely has a voice in UK literature - the working class loyalist Protestant and Orange communities living in the schemes of greater Glasgow in places like Drumchapel.Rachel Seiffert made her mark with The Dark Room (filmed as Lore) and The Way Home similarly deals with social upheaval, family troubles and absent parents, but the subject seems closer to home this time and the situation rather more complex. The focus is divided between Graham and Stevie (the connection between them soon becomes clear), Graham meeting Lindsay, a young 17 year old girl, while playing with his Drumchapel Orange Lodge band in Co. Tyrone in Northern Ireland. When the girl turns up pregnant in Glasgow, the young couple try to make a go of starting a family and keeping it together, but old traditions, the past and family troubles prove hard to put behind them.Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Seiffert doesn't wallow in the misery and there's precious little conventional violence in The Way Home. The violence is of different kind, the kind inflicted on families and individuals who strive to better their lives and escape from the trappings of the past and their community. A lot is left unsaid, but suggestions and implications are left open, in particular with relation to Lindsey's family in Northern Ireland. The story doesn't go there, but you can tell from the young girl's responses to her background and her speed at leaving home, that there's a lot there you don't want to get into.The Walk Home is, I found, an incredibly sad book. The ending is pretty much a killer, but there's a deep existential sadness related to these family issues that suffuses the whole book. It's not a pleasant or a light read, it doesn't find any easy answers or resolutions for its characters, and the outlook is quite bleak, but it's an involving and authentic look at the lives of a community whose voice and whose problems are often misunderstood, if they are considered at all.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. Tribalism By Roger Brunyate I expect most other ratings of this novel to be three stars or less, not because Rachel Seiffert is bad -- on the contrary, she is very very good -- but because the combination of her delicate understatement and the unfamiliar social enclave within which she writes will mean that many readers will not get the point of her story at all. And the enclave is indeed a small one: the Ulster Protestant diaspora in working-class Glasgow. Even the dialogue takes a bit of getting used to: "A braw lassie wae red hair doon tae her bum, missus. Nothin tae dae wae us." (A pretty girl with red hair all the way down her back, nothing to do with us.)But it so happens that this touches my own life in a couple of places. I grew up in Northern Ireland, and the Orange parades were a festive feature of the July scene, with their banners and sashes, fife bands and big painted Lambeg drums. I did not then see it as a dangerous manifestation of Protestant tribalism aimed to intimidate the Catholic minority; it was simply the mythology that the boys in my dormitory used to share in stories after lights out. Many years later, I moved to Glasgow for the first five years of my professional life, and was surprised to find the Ulster rivalries being played out in proxy by the supporters of the two football teams, Rangers and Celtic, with the same bands and symbols and almost equal aggression, though stopping short of bombs and kneecapping. I lived in a distinguished crescent in the University area, but it was impossible to ignore the hooliganism fomented by the misguided creation of huge housing projects on the fringes of the city. Drumchapel, where Seiffert's novel is largely set, was one of the worst.Her novel plays out in two time frames. In one, beginning in the early nineties, a young man named Graham travels with a Glasgow band to support an Orange march in a small town on the border between the two Irelands. He meets a girl there, Lindsey (the "braw lassie" of the above quotation), brings her back to Glasgow, and fathers her son. The other time frame is in the present, when the son, Stevie, now clearly estranged from his family, returns to Glasgow as a laborer on a construction project run by a group of Poles from Gdansk. Contrasting Stevie, who has made himself an internal exile in his own country, with this very different tribal group from Eastern Europe is one of Seiffert's more subtle strokes, though nothing is ever hammered hard on the head.Sometimes, though, you wish that Seiffert would hit a little harder. The plot of the novel is the gradual discovery of what happened to tear apart the once happy family unit of Graham, Lindsey, Stevie, and the grandmother Brenda. The book jacket mentions that Graham is associating, through his band, with people who have paramilitary or terrorist connections. But really there is no more than a brief mention of "how guns and men and malice passed back and forth between Ulster and this side of Scotland"; it is neither the guns nor the men that Seiffert concentrates on, so much as the residue of malice. Lindsey, it turns out, has left Ireland partly to escape the venom of her bigoted father. Graham's family were forced out of Ireland two generations earlier, leaving them to be raised by a bitter bible-thumping old man. Graham's uncle Eric was disowned by his father years before; now made redundant from his job as a marine draftsman, he makes obsessive drawings working out his past in quasi-allegorical fashion. As each of the other characters in turn come to see more of Eric, we learn a little more of the back-story and just possibly glimpse some avenues that may lead to healing.But don't expect big revelations, or even much action. Seiffert's writing is very low key, which is the secret of its truth, but this can also be frustrating. We never learn, for instance, much more about Lindsey than we knew at the middle of the book. And the walk home promised in the title is a long time in coming and far from complete. But at least we end with the characters pointing in the right direction.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Disappointing By Yolanda S. Bean This book, set in Glasglow, feels like it would perhaps make for a better audiobook experience than an armchair one. The dialogue nicely captures the dialect, and the prose as well nicely captures a cadence that I think would be more fun to listen to than to read. Also, if done correctly, an audio version might make the different perspectives and the lack of transitions a bit easier for the reader to become accustomed to as the first chapters all come from different points-of-view. These chapters introduce various characters including Polish contractor, Jozef who hires Glasglow native, Stevie. Stevie’s parents and his family’s past with his Northern Irish mother and his drum-playing father and his parents’ extended family and their links to the Troubles. With chapters that don’t connect to one another, the overall pacing is quite slow.But, I must admit, that it is not often that I have read a book with an obvious Northern Irish perspective sympathetic to the Protestant side, wishing to remain a part of Britain. I wish the author would have included more of the political context - that would have made this a much more fascinating read. As it stands, it is difficult to foster connections with any of the characters and this only makes the book more of a chore to slog through.The ending is quite anti-climactic and there are simply too many loose ends left dangling for this to feel even remotely satisfying to finish. Nothing feels resolved which I suppose reflects real life, but just isn’t what I am looking for in fiction. The book is not poorly written, but the characters are too underdeveloped enough to compensate for this type of conclusion. Ultimately, this is a disappointment.
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