A Long Walk to Wimbledon

H. R. F. Keating is an author who's been on my radar for a while. He wrote mainly crime fiction and books about crime fiction, perhaps most well know for his Inspector Ghote series and Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, but he also wrote one novel which is probably best described as science fiction, A Long Walk to Wimbledon published in 1978. Thanks to Bloomsbury, this novel is now back in print along with most of Keating's crime fiction.

A Long Walk to Wimbledon is set in a London where society has almost completely broken down. Large parts of Oxford Street have been reduced to rubble, packs of feral dogs roam the parks and the remaining inhabitants of London have withdrawn into small communities within the city. Nobody travels to show more other parts of the country or even to other parts of London; food, clothing, water and power are found locally or not at all. So Mark is surprised to hear his telephone ring one day and to hear the voice of his mother-in-law on the other end of the line; even more surprised when she tells him that his ex-wife, Jasmine, is dying and that Jasmine's dying request is to see Mark. Mark is unable to bring himself to refuse to go despite his fears of what he may encounter on the journey, so he sets out to walk from Highgate in North London, to Wimbledon across the river in order to get to Jasmine before she dies. A Long Walk to Wimbledon is a book about Mark's journey, both in the sense that it describes the physical obstacles he has to overcome but also that it shows us Mark's thoughts and outlook and how his forced journey challenges those. We never really find out what happened to leave London and (one assumes) the rest of the country in this state but the clues Keating gives seem to indicate that the collapse of society was caused by nothing supernatural or other-worldly, just normal, everyday people losing the desire to make society work.

"Now he knew with conviction that what lay ahead for him beyond any conjuring away was uncertainty. The territory he had pledged himself to make his way through was not simply a dangerous world. The journey facing him was not just a long walk where he would have to keep constantly alert, but which if he managed so much he might reasonably hope to complete with no more than some bad scares. No, ahead, he knew now, lay anything.

His world was at the mercy of the unmotivated.

Perhaps it had really been so for years. Perhaps that was what gradually, over as much as a century even, had been creeping up from beneath into the secure organised society which he had been brought up to believe he was living in and was entitled to live in his whole life long. The unmotivated."

A well-written, thought-provoking book that has definitely left me wanting to read more of Keating's books. show less

Mark answers his phone to find his ex-mother-in-law on the line: his ex-wife is dying and wants to see him before it's too late. Can Mark make the journey from his home in Highgate (in North London) to Wimbledon (in South-West London) to see her? Seemingly a reasonable request, but Mark's phone has not rung in several years, and he has not been more than a few streets away from his home for even longer. Civilisation has collapsed: public transport no longer runs and virtually no one has access to any private transport more sophisticated than a bicycle. So going to Wimbledon means walking, and walking through the unknown dangers that central London will involve: gangs, private militias, the trigger happy remnants of the army, feral dog show more packs and more. And Mark, an inoffensive and quiet man who ekes put a living teaching children to read and write, is not well suited to the challenges ahead.

It's an interesting feature of the book that the social collapse has not been precipitated by any external factors: it seems to be an internal collapse of society with minor riots leading to major rioting and then open warfare in the streets of London. The implication is that things may be better elsewhere but this is not certain. And perhaps this says a lot about the time when the book was written, the late 1970's, which was certainly a period when Britain seemed to be going nowhere fast.

Written in 1978, this book shows its age a little when it comes to race. While treated very sympathetically, the Indian Dr Satpathi, who Mark meets on his journey, seems very much a stock character from the TV of the period. And the demonisation of non-whites as 'tropicals', perhaps reflecting worries over racial tension in the 1960's and 70's, reads a little oddly in 2013. But otherwise a decent read. show less