There aren’t enough great novels about hiking.
The classic example is, obviously, The Lord of the Rings, where two tourists wander through war zones to reach a scenic mountain. The slog of a long walk also turns up a lot in post apocalyptic sci-fi too. My favourite example is Riddley Walker, with its pilgrimage through a post-nuclear dark-age version of Kent. But the most important post-apocalyptic hiking novel is The Road, a charming story of a father and son hike to see the ocean.
No, actually it’s a grim and depressing novel, with the characters trudging through a ruined world. Images from the film turn up in bleak political memes, with the father explaining/excusing how the world came to be like that. The most common one responds to Trump’s attacks on Hilary Clinton: “But her emails!”.
I laughed when I first saw this; but it never seemed a realistic scenario, until ex-“Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union” David Davis promised that Brexit would not mean a “Mad Max style dystopia”. I’d not considered that to be a risk until Davis suggested it. Particularly since Davis was notorious for seeming not to understand how the sequencing for negotiations was supposed to go – a fairly fundamental part of his job. And that same meme of The Road has turned up with the quote changed to be about Brexit.
Given the unbridled incompetence of DexEU, we might not be lucky enough to find ourselves even in a Mad Max-style dystopia.
But there is one hopeful things about The Road. The idea that, when everything else collapses, there is the option to start walking. It’s an idea powerfully portrayed in Raynor Winn’s book the Salt Path. If the worst is happening, keep moving.
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