Setting out to walk the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage route that once secured ‘points’ for getting into heaven, ranked only after Jerusalem and Rome in medieval times, forty-eight year old Rosemary Wallace is already uneasy about whether she will fit in as a pilgrim, whether her lack of preparation will defeat her before she has started. When she is asked why she wants to walk the Camino.
Resisting the urge to reply ‘none of your damn business’ all she can think is that she is walking because ‘I can’t go on this way or that way or any way at all. I am just walking.’ What unfolds in lucid prose that mirrors the pace of the walk, is an extraordinary group of stories that interweave as step after step is taken.
Murielle’s Angel uncovers a life-changing feat of endurance with a rhythmic heartbeat that quickens or steadies as particular characters walk in and out of Rosemary’s story; an angry young man, a tall blond stranger, an avuncular Spanish poet, Ria, a doctor accosted by a man in the village of Casanova who wants her to be his and wants a kiss ‘on account’, and the enigmatic Murielle, whose drawings invert perception, who knows when to walk and when to ride and whose doctor has given her the name of someone she will need when the time comes.
As Stefan curses aloud on alternate steps to keep himself going and Dominic shares his exuberance about returning to his home in Holland, to a celebration with family, eleven brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, sisters, mother, Rosemary can only muse on her shabby getaway from her own family, her story, she thinks, ‘an everyday tale of dysfunction.’ But under the relentless sun little can remain either everyday or hidden.
As the group make their way through lush fields and tiny hamlets, barely changed since the first pilgrims walked by a thousand years ago, changes are taking place in each of them; changes that will shape not just this strange, highly charged walk, but everything that comes next.
