The Golden Journey of Mr. Paradyne by William John LockeMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Essentially a midlife-crisis story, from the time when having a midlife crisis was admired, at least in men. It's much shorter than I (for some reason) expected it to be, and I read it in about an hour.
Successful lawyer Paradyne wakes up one morning and discovers he's the owner of a gypsy wagon and a horse and is travelling through France selling brushes and such, and has been doing so for several months. The last thing he clearly remembers is shortly before his departure from suburban Ealing on a holiday to France with his wife, who is not with him, though her ticket is. A mysterious, itinerant young man played a melody he'd never heard before outside his house, and that seems to have kicked the whole thing off.
He loves being a travelling brush-seller - perhaps because he was already wealthy, had a lot of money with him and still has a good bit of it, and therefore isn't living hand-to-mouth. His old life of the law was a dead life; his wife had even described him as a dead man, and he thinks of her now as a dead woman, cold and sour. He sees no downside whatsoever in just walking away from all his responsibilities and continuing his journey, and the narration doesn't contradict him in this. His options seem to be a dead life between his suburban home and his city office, or a romanticised life on the road, in the open air. There's no hint of a third way, in which he learns to truly live while also being faithful to his commitments.
It's well enough executed, but the naive romanticism loses it the third star from me. I'd hoped, at a small inflection point in my own career, that it might help me think through next steps. It did not.
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