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Martin Walker brings a sense of the magical other
Book Review
By Derryll White
Walker, Martin (2009). The Dark Vineyard.
You want to travel and experience the sensual pleasures of rural southern France? You don’t want to hassle with the airport security and lost baggage? Then you want to pick up Martin Walker’s ‘The Dark Vineyard’ and visit the Dordogne region, spending some very pleasurable hours in the commune of Saint-Denis.
The inhabitants are welcoming – an astute Mayor, Chief of Police Bruno, aged hippies and bakers, butchers and wine merchants who will help the reader forget Canada’s becoming the 51st state or the bombing of Iran.
Martin Walker grasps the concept of place and brings it so gracefully to the page. The reader embraces the lure of the ancient artists of Lascaux, at the same time experiencing the rural customs of tromping the grapes and tasting the first young wines. Chief Bruno experiences some modern world problems – encroaching modernity and genetically modified crops – but he chooses to maintain the endearing qualities of his vibrant rural village.
Martin Walker stands alongside Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin and Paul Theroux as an évocateur extraordinaire of a sense of the magical other, the place you would like to be in.
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Excerpt from the novel:
TRAVEL – Coux was a quiet place with a bakery, a tabac, a café and a small hotel where Bruno would occasionally join friends for Sunday lunch. It lay outside the commune of Saint-Denis, so he did not know it well. Thinking his jurisdiction was therefore somewhat limited, he left his cap in the van.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
