The Salt Path - The View Before And After

I wrote the following review after reading 'The Salt Path' a couple of years ago as a summer read. But first a preface to the review, given the recent publicity the book and the author have attracted.

With modern popular writing that flatters our intelligence it is meant to be hard to spot the tricks, the deceptions, the author and the editor create between them that make a narrative easier to swallow and resist awkward questions. At the time of reading the book I found it easy to grasp the deceptively simple narrative 'property owning upper middle class couple take a tumble on the property market and take a very long walk with their tent for shelter to think about what has happened to them', but I did not not grasp at the deceptions that made the book so easy to read. Calling Timothy the familiar 'Moth' was one, we are apparently let in on their intimacy that way. And the story of Moth having an illness that was both intermittent and defied doctors diagnosis seemed to be both baffling and opaque. If the author was being dishonest at that point, then the reader could not tell where the dishonesty started-with the doctors, the patient, the author, who renamed herself Raynor Winn, or the editors who were taken in after signing the right legal wavers.   

Any adult who as a child used to watch 'Dr Who' as a child can understand how it was written as an adult: there had to be a ratio of moments of ease followed by moments of heart tugging anxiety, and every so often moments of extreme anxiety including moments of grief, mortification, and great loss. The nearest Raynor Winn got to in print to being genuinely scared and scary was when with nearly no money to call on from anywhere they were genuinely hungry and their middle class values were tested by the temptation to steal junk food from a shop. The hollowness of the account of being tempted was plain when the couple faced none of the consequences of those who  had stolen might get, all they got was a mild attack of middle class guilt at breaking property laws that were immersed in that had served them so well. And was Moth really ill? We only have Raynor's word for that, but even the name of his illness had a literary/almost Dr Who jargon-style feel to it. It could be something or nothing but it was well used to heighten tension when the book needed it.

  

Review starts here: Bob Dylan wrote one set of couplets in his song 'Like a Rolling Stone' that was always the fulcrum of what was already a powerful song lyric; 'When you've got nothing/you've got nothing to lose/you're invisible/you got no secrets to conceal'.

Very few people ever go from having all that society gives to having-literally-nearly nothing. Here are a couple who are married for over thirty years who have built themselves up to have a lot and they have a personal history tied the land and the farmhouse that have lived in a long time which due to who knows how many slip ups with the law and the increasingly complex financial systems over a period of three years they lose it, all of it. Not only that the man, called Moth, is ill with some disease that makes him tired that no doctor has a name for, and more importantly a medicine for, that actually works. So that on some days he hopes to be going his body does not know whether it is is coming or going. The body of the book is about what they did next.

So, with very little money coming in every week they decide to walk and go wild tenting the length of The Salt Way, a long ancient coastal path that runs through several counties of South West England that became known for it's scenery but was in the days of much slower transport a route for selling salt, which in those slow times was a vital commodity. Indeed, they put the preservative -the salt- back into their own lives through taking the walk and keeping going however long it takes them.

Thus they proceed on a series of repetitive actions, walking, camping, observing nature, observing people from the point of view of being outsiders, getting tired, but most of all not giving up on the goal-the length of the walk they set themselves. The end of the book is surprising, less for the way as outsiders and wild campers they see the rest of society, than for how surprised they are when one particular insider on society alights on their story, they tell the truth and the face value of their yields Raynor and Moth what they knew they needed but had no clue how it might be got. Their story and the walking/camping that became part of it, became the currency that paid for it's own renewal among people who were not like them and had plenty whilst Raynor and Moth had only what they could put in rucksack and walk away with. And it all happened in a way where the demonstration of human generosity meant more than any talk of same.

Having said what the book is about, my description is still only an outline. The journey is best taken by reading the book, one final tip; if you have a map of the route they take then as they name places they go through then it might compliment your read and prove helpful.