THE WALKER

A collection of short stories ranges from the rocky Welsh landscape of Testimonies to the softer Mediterranean coastline of The Catalans, confines a talent which is perhaps better suited to this medium, and includes some brief moments of experience where fate often adds the finishing touches to failure and futility. The unending hours of an obsessive, a perfectionist, waste a life which is suspended between the strokes of his clocks; a forced climb to high places becomes as unbearable to a woman as her husband; a German, up against the wall of hatred of a Catalan village, finds no comfort or corroboration in his Nazi faith; an artist, at the end of his success, turns to the rich friend of former years and is now ready to sell him a few pictures- but the man who greets him is blind; there's a cheerful fable of early Welsh Christendom; a voyage to the Indies; some sporting stories- a drawing of badgers, a duck shoot, a mountain climb, and some fishing sorties where the catch is death, etc. etc. Varied and versatile, O'Brian is also a careful writer (never a flubbed phrase) who ministers to minority tastes. These however will be appreciative.