Cape £16.99 pp328
In the wake of Christ’s resurrection, his disciples supposedly scattered to the four corners of the known world in order to spread the good news. James, truculent brother of John, got the job of evangelising the Iberian peninsula. He made seven converts. Returning, chastened, to the Holy Land, the luckless apostle was martyred by Herod Agrippa. In death, James was more successful than in life. Smuggled back to northwest Spain, his body eventually became the focus for the second most popular pilgrimage in Europe. Only Rome got more visitors in search of spiritual sustenance. In the Middle Ages, millions made the journey to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela to see the bones of the apostle. Hundreds of thousands still do. Some are traditional Catholic pilgrims. Some are new-age mystics convinced that the Christian route to Santiago is just the latest version of a more ancient pathway linking ley line to ley line. Some, like Tim Moore, are travel writers in search of a subject for their next book. The actress Shirley MacLaine travelled the camino accompanied, so she said, by an angel who smelt of vanilla. Moore, less spiritually advanced perhaps, was accompanied on his pilgrimage by a donkey called Shinto who smelt of dung.
Bumbling Englishmen abroad are stock figures in contemporary travel writing, and Moore can bumble with the best of them. From the moment he first spots Shinto in a Pyrenean paddock, to the moment, six weeks later, when the pair of them stagger into Santiago, the pilgrimage is an exercise in humiliation and the punishment of hubris for him. One-legged pilgrims on crutches outpace him on the route. Trainee priests at a seminary mock his incompetent attempts to stable his donkey for the night. Linguistic encounters with locals become elaborate sagas of misunderstanding and misplaced vowels. (Only at the end of his journey does he realise that, thanks to a crucial shifting of vocal inflection, he has been regularly ordering people to pick up his donkey’s dung rather than informing them that he was about to do so himself.)
Most of all, man and donkey engage in a terrific battle of wills. Moore wants to journey in the footsteps of the generations of pilgrims who have gone before. Shinto doesn’t. Moore wants to travel 20km a day across the varied landscapes of northern Spain. Shinto wants to stand by the roadside and chew the vegetation.
How much comedy can be extracted from the age-old confrontation between man and ass? A lot — if not quite as much as Moore thinks. Moore is a funny writer and there are plenty of laugh-aloud passages in his book, but there are times when one dispute with an obstinate donkey seems much the same as the previous half dozen, only less amusing. Getting Shinto across Spain was obviously an arduous job, but Spanish Steps would be a better book if it didn’t sometimes seem like just one shaggy-donkey story after another.
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