MY OLD copy of Chesterton’s The Defendant comes from The Wayfarer’s Library, issued by Dent to “embrace all that is healthy, clean and good in the lighter field of modern literature”, and designed to slip easily into the tweedy Edwardian pocket.
Finding the Wayfarer is a severe corrective to such sentimentalising of English wayfaring, which was frequently unhealthy, unclean, and vicious. It embodied a sprawling variety of foot-travel, often in search of work or shelter, sometimes close to vagrancy, and more interested in survival than accomplishment. Books about pilgrimage or “the journey of life” proliferate; but wayfaring has not received much attention.
The author starts with an original examination of the tiny, everyday figures that have a walk-on part in the margins of many medieval illuminated manuscripts. Thereafter, the book, as she says, “meanders” across an eclectic range of instances of wayfaring, literary and historical, from most periods up to the present.
Interspersed with this, Emma Rose Barber creates writerly descriptions of her own wayfaring, particularly in Sussex and Norfolk, along with reflections as arising in the mind of a confessedly “restless” person.
A book on wayfaring has every right to be digressive, but Finding the Wayfarer suffers substantially from a lack of direction, moving from one topic to another in a loose association of thoughts, with little development of ideas. Chapters are titled according to the seven corporal works of mercy, but sit lightly to this sequence. The problem is compounded by a fondness for oddities of expression and incomplete sentences that frequently make it difficult to know quite what the author means.
It culminates in a bizarre boxed list of her irrational fears. “I sit in the kitchen and there are sounds coming from the fridge. I think there is somebody in there.”
Finding the Wayfarer comes from a hybrid publishing imprint. These offer publishing services to authors who provide the main investment in a book’s production, but the imprint may also lack the rigour of traditional publishing. Barber has found a promising subject, and has assembled an extraordinary and interesting range of information, much of it unfamiliar (including 15 pages on the depiction of apes in classical and medieval tradition). But, as wayfarers discover, you can set off with enthusiasm and still lose your way.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
Finding the Wayfarer: Physical, spiritual and poetic survival
Emma Rose Barber
Tandem Publishing £20
(978-1-0687613-7-9)
Church Times Bookshop £18
