A Walking Guide: A Novel

By Alan S. Cowell

Book Overview

Diagnosed with a terminal nerve disorder, intrepid war journalist Joe Shelby embarks on a last attempt to scale England's highest mountain, a quest that tests his courage and forces him to come to terms with his illness. A first novel. 17,500 first printing.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743244702
• ISBN13: 9780743244701
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Contemplating The Final Transition

While reading Alan S. Cowell's deeply felt, exquisitely rendered first novel I found myself thinking repeatedly about literature that dominated a bygone era of existential discourse. Books by novelists such as Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry and, to a lesser extent, even the early work of the semi-surrealist writer Paul Bowles. I believe this association was occasioned by both the subject matter of A Walking Guide and its style of execution. As for the former, in this study of a daring, successful war correspondent at the end of his long career Cowell explores in contemporaneous narrative and action-filled flashback travel to exotic places, adventure deeply permeated by danger of a sort that pits the individual against inimical forces outside of his control (thus providing a test of just what one is made of), and the final travail of the male ego as it encounters and then is forced to confront the inroads of age and disability as they encroach upon youthful fantasies of omnipotence and immortality. Reinforcing the evocation of an erstwhile era, the writing itself seemed somewhat anachronistic stylistically, purposefully crafted in such a way as to revert the reader's sensibility to a simpler time than the one we currently inhabit; a time that precedes our post-modern age which is replete with technology and distraction from personal angst and the necessity to come to terms with inherent limitations of the self and, even more importantly, the body within which that self resides. Briefly, the plot of A Walking Guide concerns the desire of its protagonist, Joe Shelby, to provide himself with an outsized challenge on familiar terrain after having been diagnosed with motor neuron disease as he approaches fifty years of age. A tremendously virile individual up to this moment of his life, Joe is quickly losing the use of both his left arm and leg and has been told that the rest of his body will soon follow along a dreaded route of inevitable muscular failure.Terrified that he will be faced with immobility and dependence on others for subsistence, this proud, incredibly strong and willful man undertakes a final journey to relive the glory of the past. Of course, his decision to climb the highest peak in England alone, and in an already weakened state, places Joe in sufficient jeopardy to create 'passively' the conditions for a preemptive suicide so that he might avoid having to face the ultimate horror of being buried alive inside himself as his disease progresses. Cowell works systematically with a number of terribly difficult universal questions as his vulnerable protagonist struggles with destiny in a late summer freak snow storm on the mountain. Foremost amongst these questions are how exactly are we as sentient creatures to cope with the prospect of our own demise and, by extension, what is our responsibility (to ourselves and to others who figure significantly in our lives) for the form of our own death as we move along the inexorable trajectory to oblivi