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rue_baldry 's review for:
Run to the Western Shore
by Tim Pears
The setting for this story is very unusual, I had never thought of it before, but the transitional period when the Roman Empire was taking over Britain is an underexplored period.
In this novel, Pears explores it through the eyes of a Black slave used as an interpreter by the Romans, and a Welsh princess, who run away together.
There are incidents in this story, but there isn’t much of a plot or story arc. It reminds me of an episodic adventure like Gawain And The Green Knight, or Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, or, indeed, in very different landscapes, Pears’ own The Wanderers or In The Light Of Morning. The journeying is the story, the introduction to nature, their learning about each other, the landscape, the revelations of history and myth.
The descriptions are lovely. The prose is often beautiful, although it also mirrors the plain telling of Anglo Saxon and Arthurian writing. The two young protagonists teach each other how to see things and how to listen. The natural world teaches them how to love one another and how to live fully within it.
In this novel, Pears explores it through the eyes of a Black slave used as an interpreter by the Romans, and a Welsh princess, who run away together.
There are incidents in this story, but there isn’t much of a plot or story arc. It reminds me of an episodic adventure like Gawain And The Green Knight, or Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, or, indeed, in very different landscapes, Pears’ own The Wanderers or In The Light Of Morning. The journeying is the story, the introduction to nature, their learning about each other, the landscape, the revelations of history and myth.
The descriptions are lovely. The prose is often beautiful, although it also mirrors the plain telling of Anglo Saxon and Arthurian writing. The two young protagonists teach each other how to see things and how to listen. The natural world teaches them how to love one another and how to live fully within it.