In September 1913, DH Lawrence set off from the German city of Konstanz on a trip that would take him across Switzerland to the Italian city of Como. During his journey, by foot and steamer, he came to see how modern tourism was having a corrupting influence on the natural world and disrupting “an age-old intimacy with the land and its rhythms”.
In Milan, he was due to meet Frieda Weekley, the married German woman with whom he had run away from England. And it is their decision to break with convention and societal norms regarding marital fidelity that echoes through this compelling novel.
Retired headmaster Daniel Burrow is retracing Lawrence’s route across Switzerland in a doomed bid to exorcise the ghosts of a past relationship. As he walks through the chocolate-box landscape – “There’s a well-swept Swissness to it all” – he reminisces about a previous trip along the same route he undertook, many years ago, with a former lover, Julia, an academic who is researching Lawrence from an ecocritical point of view.
During these flashbacks, while Burrow eagerly looks forward to Julia leaving her husband and coming to live with him in the house he has bought in London, she has a series of presentiments about the potentially devastating consequences of their decision.
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Julia wishes to emulate her literary hero Lawrence by living a great love in defiance of family and society, but she is also hesitant to take the fateful last step. Meanwhile, Burrow finds his own happiness at risk from his lover’s children’s threatened traumas.
In the present day, the spirits of both Julia and Lawrence accompany the older Burrow as he tramps through the Swiss valleys, ruminating upon the nature of his journey – “Thinking is less dangerous on the move” – and its siren promise of freedom.
But what Parks is most interested in exploring is the agonising choice between safe domestic “ordinariness that is almost a blight” and the thrilling promise of illicit passion, as well as the contested history of a relationship between a married woman whose choice risks alienating her from her children and her widowed lover who yearns for a transformational moment to restart his own life. And all the while one of the most famous of all literary nonconformists to sexual mores, DH Lawrence, is hovering in the rarefied Alpine ether.
