In Green, by Louis D Hall review: 'soaring highs and crushing lows'

Out of time yet also curiously timeless, this remarkable adventure story is never less than compelling, writes Roger Cox

In these enlightened times, any attempt at travel writing by a young, white, male, relatively wealthy author risks being perceived as inherently problematic - an exercise in treading on eggshells that will require the conspicuous checking of privilege. In his account of trekking the 2,000-odd miles from Siena in Italy to Finisterre on the west coast of Spain with a horse called Sasha, Scottish writer Louis D Hall gets the self-abasement out of the way early. "Who the hell do I think I am?" he writes on page 18. "I am a middle-class 26 year-old man-child and I know no real loss. I have never been persecuted and I do not know what it is to struggle to live."

So, Hall begins his 111-day odyssey as something of a self-confessed blank canvas, but - counterintuitively perhaps - that's actually to the benefit of his story. Along the way he will experience both hardship and heartache, if not for the first time then at least with the searing clarity of someone who has yet to have become inured to the effects of either. To read this book in cynical middle-age, then, is to be reminded of just how raw and visceral life can feel to the young.

Louis D Hall | Contributed

The feat that Hall sets out to accomplish is considerable, not just in terms of the distance covered but in terms of the terrain involved. At one point, while following former partisan trails through the Ligurian Alps, he and Sasha have to make "an 800-metre ascent at a near 50-degree angle". Stop and consider that the Flypaper at Glencoe - one of the steepest in-bounds ski runs in Europe - has a pitch of around 45-degrees, and you'll get an idea of the kinds of demands Hall was making both of himself and his horse, who must surely be part mountain goat.

Having battled their way through the mountains to reach Giovo Ligure, about 50km due west of Genoa, Hall and Sasha are joined by a young Dutch woman, Kiki, and her horse Istia. Still in mourning following the death of her sister just six months before, Kiki has decided that joining Hall on his Don Quixote-inspired quest will help her to heal. After weeks of being alone with Sasha on the trail, however, Hall isn't sure how he'll "adapt to her presence", and Kiki's boyfriend, R, also has misgivings.

Whatever the reader may think of the rights and wrongs of what follows there's no denying that the psychological complexities of it all make for a fascinating cat's cradle, and Hall's account of this out of time yet also curiously timeless adventure, with its soaring highs and crushing lows, is never less than compelling.

In Green, by Louis D Hall, Duckworth, £18.99