Following in the footsteps of DH Lawrence's walk from Alps to Como

On the face of it, they were not well-suited. She was six years older than him, of aristocratic stock, and the mother of three children. Life in a provincial English town was driving her crazy. For his part, Lawrence was from a working-class, mining background and more or less penniless. One of the first fruits of the pair’s often tempestuous relationship was the travel book Twilight in Italy, on which Tim Parks draws heavily in his latest novel, Mr Geography.

As we know, all books are dependent to a lesser or greater degree on other ones. Piggybacking - to give it a non-literary sheen - is as a popular as ever. It is, of course, a legitimate activity but one that is fraught with difficulty. For example, to what extent do people, even those steeped in reading, go about their daily lives referring - and deferring - to what dead authors wrote a century and more ago?  It all seems a bit too manufactured and contorted. 

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Early in Mr Geography, the narrator, Daniel Burrow, a retired headmaster and geography teacher, at the beginning of his trek across Switzerland to Como in Italy, is asked by a young couple he encounters why he is doing it. He tells them he is following in the footsteps of Lawrence. “Lady Chatterley’s Liebhaber!” shrieks the mother. Dan, it transpires, is being economical with the truth. For while Lawrence gives him a pretext, his real reason is that he wants to revisit the places and a time he spent with Julia, a professor of literature, with whom he had a long affair, which ended abruptly while they were following Lawrence’s route. If this all seems incestuously literary, who am I to argue. 

Milan-based Parks is well-known - and well-respected - as a novelist (he has been shortlisted for the Booker) and as the author of a number of well-received and incisive books about Italy. He has an easy style and knows how, apparently effortlessly, to move characters from A to B.

In Mr Geography, given his narrator is not a writer, he employs clipped, staccato-like sentences that ping from the page like a flurry of text messages, as indeed they sometimes are. “Thinking about the corner of your mouth,” Julia texts. “Peter is away Thursday. The curve of your back. Why do you wear such boring shirts! Fraid I have an exam at three. Catherine is acting up again. Are you in a meeting? The body mist, not the perfume. It’s raining here. Can’t wait to be with you. Tomorrow at Caffé Nero. Sleep tight. Beautiful. Don’t dream anything I wouldn’t.”

(Image: Vintage)

It may only be me but that “beautiful” jarred. Do women really call men, even ones with whom they’re passionately engaged, beautiful? Maybe they do; but if I were to call my nearest and dearest that I suspect he would tell me urgently to make an appointment with the optician.

Peter, by the way, is Julia’s cuckolded husband. The worst that can be said of him is that he is “ordinary” and that this has prompted Julia to take up with Dan, who doesn’t seem to be particularly extraordinary. Catherine is one of Julia’s two children - her son barely features. Like her brother, Catherine was a pupil at the private school when Dan was then headmaster. The school is in Yorkshire, near Malton, which literary geeks will know is near the infamous establishment on which Dickens based Dotheboys Hall. Parks makes no mention of this; perhaps it’s his little in-joke.

As Dan hikes his way across Switzerland he harks back constantly both to Lawrence’s journey in 1913 and the one he made with Julia when he was decades younger. Now he is retired and in reflective mode. En route to Altdorf - famed for its association with William Tell - she had received a message on her phone from Catherine saying: “We know who you’re with. Peter is destroyed. You’ve got to come back now.” But instead of calling home, Julia started to talk about Lawrence. The reason he pushed himself so hard, she said, and walked so far and so fast, without enjoying himself, “is precisely to repress the awareness that’s he’s not free at all. The holiday is part of the larger machine he’s trapped in.”

Catherine’s phone call, like the extraordinary letter Lawrence sent in 1912 telling Professor Weekley about his affair with his wife and the need to let her go, and tragic event that follows, brought Dan and Julia’s trip to an abrupt end. Thereafter, Dan relates, the couple lost contact. What, then, had their relationship been about? What was it for, its significance? He had even bought a house into which he dreamed that he and Julia and her children would move together. “I was in love with Julia,” he recalls. “Surely that was all that mattered. I loved her turbulence. Her eagerness to live.”

No one now can answer the questions Dan poses, least of all Julia, who is dead. He must walk alone, or with strangers he meets on the trail, consumed by thoughts of what might have been. Was she really serious about their relationship or was she just using him to add spice to her own dull life, vicariously to live as Frieda did with Lawrence? Recovering after a near-death experience in the mountains, Dan reflects on the paths people take, one leading to safety, another to fatal danger. It is the perennial ‘what if?’ question. But as Robert Frost wrote in ‘The Road Not Taken’, when faced with two choices you cannot have both. Even so, whether I would be inclined to ask DH Lawrence for advice is doubtful.