This book was read at Kalimna, Yeranda cottages, near Dungog in early January 2025.
Stuck, as many of us lamentably often are, in a variety of fairly unchanging workplaces, the idea that we might be condemned to wandering the earth without ceasing for our entire lives might seem an attractive one.
Freed from the constraints of laptops and tools, of cubicles and worksite, we could simply bear witness to all the myriad wonders of the world, take the time to explore them and to live a thousand lives in one geographically rich lifetime.
But what if this gift of wanderlust came with some fairly major strings attached? Say, you had to keep moving every three days or you would die from an horrific disease characterised by seizures, Ebola-like blood letting and an ability to control your limbs?
Then you’d be onetime aristocratic child Aubry Tourvel, the protagonist of Douglas Westerbeke’s masterfully engaging debut novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World, which, beginning in 1885 Paris, takes us on a journey not simply across the wildly varied planet of ours but through life itself, what it means to be human and why connection of the deepest and most prevailing kind is so essential to our wellbeing on so many fundamental levels.
In many ways, this enchantingly beautiful and ruminative novel is quite dark and melancholically cold.
Aubry is “gifted” with her involuntary need to roam, and roam unceasingly, as just nine years of age after she picks a mysterious wooden puzzle ball that’s sits, almost as if it’s expecting her, on the stoop of a dead neighbour’s home.
Quickly losing interest, Aubry tosses it over a fence and thinks nothing of it; but the seemingly magical ball keeps reappearing in her satchel and in her room, and after an incident with her sisters where she finally refuses to part with it (an acceptance, it turns out, of an offer, she didn’t even know the ball was making, Jumanji-like), she falls in with a mysterious illness that only abates when she is in forward movement.
Walking back home with her sisters, her knapsack seemed a little heavier–not much–perhaps it wasn’t even the weight, but the unfamiliar bulge she felt. She stopped to see what it was.
The puzzle ball, in her knapsack. Who had put it there? What kind of joke was being played here?
A bright and precocious youngest child, Aubry quickly works out that she only feels better when she’s moving and so she and her mother, with her father and two older sisters looking worryingly on, embarks on a ceaseless journey forward, ever forward, through Europe, taking care never to retrace their steps or stay in one place too long.
This ceaseless whir of movement takes a toll on them both, and after about three years, Aubry cannot bear to see her mother suffer and she leaves in the night, abandoning her in a Croatian inn and setting on a lifelong journey where family contact is sparse and largely via the written word – they do send money and visit where they can but even though they love her dearly and her condition greaves them, they have lives to lead, and Aubry maturely and fatalistically accepts that – and where she simply has to survive by any means possible.
It’s not so much living, not at first and this itinerant lifestyle, marked by hunger, lack of shelter and a distinct exile from the wider, more wondrous stream of humanity, certainly costs her dearly as, heeding a voice that doesn’t sound cruel but whose actions could be seen as such, she moves through a world which, as the back cover blurb notes, “may not be quite the same as everyone else’s”.
Sure, she is seeing the world in a way that few of her late-eighteenth century and early nineteenth century do, confined often to limited geographic zones by finances, lack of transportation and by the connection to family and friends which they do not want to give up, but the cost, quite apart from her health (she is always in danger of dying should she linger too long in any one place), is terribly high.
(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
But she has no choice but to pay it; the only real compensation is that she gets to see the world but also a magical world below and throughout the world, the exact nature of which must be left go the reading of A Short Walk Through a Wide World and Westerbeke’s luminously beautiful and emotionally evocative writing.
He is one of those writers who can use the most lovely and poetic language, the kind the demands a reread and a glorious lingering, the kind Aubry really has no time for, and not feel like he is using beautiful language is simply there to show off his prowess with prose.
His writing is emotionally accessible and richly alive, and it adds volumes to the story of Aubry who, through some necessarily short but profoundly meaningful, and thus because she always has to leave them, sadness-tinged connections, takes a god long while to move from simply surviving to living, or as much as her strange illness affords her.
While we come to know her illness as almost a person, the truth is that for all the wonder her condition gifts her, and she ventures from the Tibetan plateau to the inner reaches of the jungle-dense Amazon, from San Francisco to the windswept climes of Patagonia and into the heart of the Sahara, Aubry is robbed of family, friends, a childhood and a normal adulthood.
She is a subject of fascination across the world, and the press writes about her widely and so she is a celebrity of sorts, but though she is always around people and always connecting with them briefly, and in some cases, profoundly deeply, she is always, in the ways that truly count, ALONE.
It is a magical existence, and certainly large parts of A Short Walk Through a Wide World are charmingly delightful and compellingly gorgeous, but underlying it all is a deep sadness of what has been lost and what can never be regained.
Marta is silent for a long time. Aubry thinks Marta is asleep, but then Marta says, in a long, slow murmur: ‘I spent my life chasing things I could not have.’
Aubry places her tea beside Marta and sits the rest of the afternoon by her friend’s side, occasionally lifting her head to help her drink. The old woman dances circles around them both.
For all that though A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a stunningly immersive and gorgeously inviting read.
While her connections are suggested with the inevitability of parting, Aubry meets some amazing people, people who are open to her strange and unusual world, who come to understand that for all the wonders and delights, there are also a great many things which are sad and lonely and alienating.
Ultimately what A Short Walk Through a Wide World is about is how, though life exposes to wonders and joys and exciting possibilities aplenty, it really means nothing in the end without meaningful connection with those around us.
These relationships help us to make sense of the world, one which is rich and thrillingly complex and which nourishes the soul in some truly life-changing ways, and without them, we can still experience the world but nowhere near as fully and richly.
Aubry knows in one way how lucky she is to have seen the world, even under some fairly terrible and coercive circumstances, but she is also keenly aware of how alone she is, of how much she misses the pulse of normalcy, of having a career and a marriage and the stuff of normal life, and of being continuously connected to a world she has seen. Lot of but which always feels at arm’s length from her in some fairly important ways.
Very much summoning the feel of books like The Thousand Doors of January by Alex E. Harrow and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, A Short Walk Through a Wide World is a wholly rewarding read, one that offers up a truly original and imaginative story that for all its breathtaking magicality and rich variety is more than slightly tinged with a great deal of melancholy and loss in amongst treasured moments, for Aubry (and yes, for us as readers for you come to love this remarkable woman) as it takes around the world but also into the very heart of Aubry’s heart which appreciates her unusual life but which also wishes, more than once, that it had been a life a little more ordinary and more in step with those of the people around her.
Does it happily? Of course, this reviewer can’t even begin to tell you that, but suffice to say, as it weaves its tale, A Short Walk Through a Wide World reminds you to treasure life and the world, to be glad of all the experiences you have, but to always, ALWAYS, treasure who experience life with and to remember that though the world js big and amazing and wonderful, that it is only, ultimately, as good as the people in it.