Sinners & Sin-Eaters

THE WALK HOME (205 pp.)--Gwyn Jones--Norton ($3.95).

Wales in the 19th century was barren, poor, diseased and hagridden with superstition. It was, in short, picturesque but a tough place for Welshmen. Seen in retrospect by Welsh Novelist Jones, it remains determinedly picturesque but a hazardous place for novelists.

The walk of Novelist Jones's title refers to the picaresque progress of the book's hero across the width of Wales in search of the father who had abandoned him and his impoverished mother years before. The highway, like the highways of Fielding or Smollett, yields a complete novelist's kit of cutpurses and murderers, madmen and saints. The hero is set upon by mastiffs, trampled to insensibility by a mob, and nearly deprived of his virginity by a jade. He meets a cold-eyed man accompanied by a pox-pitted villain named Scabbo; the two of them pursue him so murderously through the book that he is at one point forced to tear off Scabbo's right hand with a pair of tongs in pure self-defense. He winds up in the dock, as most picaresque heroes do sooner or later. Through all his progress he is reminded again and again--first by a wise man, later by various wandering seers--that he is fulfilling the conditions of some mystic fate.

The book's weakness is its uncertainty of intent. Novelist Jones never seems to have made up his mind whether he was writing a fantasy or a piece of purely historical fiction. When the hero goes to the gallows, a reader can only wonder whether the eye of the Wise Man of Ty Cerrig sent him there--or circumstantial evidence and a bamboozled jury. In fact, The Walk Home is best read as a sort of historical travelogue rather than a novel. It tells a reader all he needs to know--or will want to--of a semibarbarous land and time when a Sin-Eater was still summoned to the side of the dead to draw out the last vestiges of evil.

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