A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H.R.F. Keating

Book Overview

First published in 1978, this is a London where the worst has happened. There have been riots, huge uncontrolled fires, outbreaks of savage looting, artillery battles, mass flights. The great city lies three parts deserted, open to marauding gangs and beast-wild individuals, its highways and landmarks tumbled like ruined temples.

To Mark, comparatively safe up in less troubled Highgate, there comes a message that his estranged wife is dying over in Wimbledon, right across on the far side of the dangerous bowl of the devastated city. Reluctant almost to sticking-point, he sets out to go to her.

His journey is a story of adventure through the ruins. His immediate business is the simple one of pressing on through all the debris, always driven because he knows that Jasmine will die soon. He may never get there: he may be killed by idiotic accident, torn to pieces by the packs of wild dogs, trapped in one of the communes that within their stockades have established their own ruthlessly puritanical disciplines.

But the difficulties and the dangers teach him lessons as he struggles onwards. He learns from the past. If it was drink, drugs and the dolce vita that had done for his wife, had not something similar destroyed the city too? He learns about the present amid its hazards. And he learns, as he comes at last to the bleak end of his Iong walk, lessons for a just possible future.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1448200989
• ISBN13: 9781448200986
• Release Date: December 2012
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Reader
• Length: 234 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Share the gifts and the madness

Having read so many post-apocalyptic sagas, it requires something rather special indeed to stand out above the rest. Keating's A Long Walk to Wimbledon is, quite simply, one of the very best of the genre. The painstaking wealth of detail crammed into the novel's 190 pages paint a stunningly vivid picture of our hero's trek across London's ruined landscape of the not-too-distant future. Anyone who knows London will revel in the thrill of recognition as familiar, but horribly changed, thoroughfares and landmarks are reached. I couldn't resist following Mark's journey through the metropolis on my London A-Z. The story's strongest feature however, is the sheer humanity (and frequent inhumanity) of the tragic players in a morality play of a world gone to hell. Pearls of poignancy and aching beauty shine out from wretched filth and squalor. Surprisingly, against so grim a background, Keating, the master story-teller, manages to wring a strong message of hope for the human spirit. A perfect bend of allegory and nerve-tingling action and suspense. Keating has created nothing short of a classic in this strongest candidate ever for a "have to read in one sitting" novel.