The Wanderers

Tim Pears

Bloomsbury, £14.99

Review by Nick Major

FOR a long while after the First World War, it became de rigueur to idealise the Edwardian period as a series of innocent garden parties carried out on pristine English lawns. In Tim Pears’s second book in his West Country Trilogy, the prevailing image of the pre-war period is of a harsh moorland interspersed with tangled thickets and copses, and populated by social outcasts and rag-tag travellers. For the 13-year old Leo Sercombe there is not a cream tea in sight as he walks and rides through Devonshire towards Cornwall.

Pears has chosen as his epigraph a passage from Genesis where God banishes Cain to wander the earth in sin. At the beginning of The Wanderers, Leo too has been banished, but from the farm of his childhood where he grew up. The narrative, however, is not simply an aimless tramp, although there is plenty of enjoyable wayfaring. Leo is looking to reach Penzance, where he thinks some of his family might still live. Ill and starving, he is picked up by a band of gypsies, who take him in, even though he is a gentile. But life among them is cruel. It seems, like Cain, Leo is destined to be flogged by everyone he meets.

After being forced to race a white colt for money, Leo escapes and ends up working at a farm. Pears writes some devastating and brutal scenes here that are truly difficult to read. One involves Leo’s "friend" Wilf forcing him to behead a live sparrow with his teeth. Leo often wonders why he meets violence wherever he goes. "Perhaps there was some oddity in his manner that provoked people. Something of the runt about him, of the hen-pecked or nag-ridden." Or perhaps, "it was simply that there existed more violence in the world, in man, than he happened to feel within himself".

Pears matches this violence with beauty: exquisite, startling and detailed descriptions of the countryside. Even though the novel’s action is seen through Leo’s eyes, often the human drama is the backdrop to the natural world. This works well. Leo, after all, is more interested in nature than humans, but it is also indicative of the novel’s central flaw: Pears is better at writing about our relationship with nature than our relationship with each other. Too often the scenes of human conflict are poorly paced or seem unnecessarily truncated.

Leo’s story is partnered with his lost friend Lottie’s, the daughter of the estate Leo was forced to leave. Lottie also has little time for people. She is engrossed in the biological sciences, and spends her time dissecting rats and picking flowers, seemingly unaware that her father is courting her best friend. We are given to believe Leo and Lottie’s stories are held together because of their young longing for each other, yet they scarcely think of one another. As a result, the book becomes two novels, hardly related.

Pears’s painterly style, however, should keep the reader engrossed. He creates clear-eyed portraits of a lost way of life, and of a people whose traditions were disregarded throughout most of the 20th century. This is most keenly felt in the character of Rufus, the hermit tramp who becomes Leo’s saviour. Country life used to be populated by these eccentric gypsies, pagans and mystics. The Wanderers invites them in to our imaginations once again. For all its faults, Pears’s book is an odd sort of triumph: a novel for those who – in the words of that old folk song – ain’t got no home in this world any more.