If you hit Google, you'll bring up a pretty healthy list of literary couples. You've got Percy and Mary Shelley; Virginia and Leonard Woolf; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and maybe even Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Of Course, we also have Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton. But, curiously, none of these duos ever wrote and published a book together. Whether that was due to differing writing styles or maybe just too much ego in the room, either way cohabitation and co-writing is a pretty rare thing to find.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Graeme Simsion a few year's ago for Groove. He is the internationally bestselling author of The Rosie Project, The Rosie Effect and The Best of Adam Sharp. His partner, Anne Buist, is also an author (writing the Natalie King thriller series) - Both are published by Text. They live together in Melbourne. Two Steps Forward is their first published collaboration.
The novel is structured into short, first-person chapters: the initial strand, entitled “Zoe”, is written by Buist, the second, entitled “Martin”, is written by Simsion. The two narrators alternate to tell the story of two middle-aged, middle-class strangers who embark on the 2000km pilgrimage — called the Camino — from Cluny in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
In 2010 The Way (an American drama film directed, produced and written by Emilio Estevez) was released starring his father Martin Sheen, Deborah Kara Unger, James Nesbitt, Yorick van Wageningen, and Renée Estevez. It honoured the Camino de Santiago and promoted the traditional pilgrimage. It was hugely popuar and inspired a great deal of 'walking' tourism in the region. It has been said for centuries that walking “The Way’’ brings great positive, personal changes and an opportunity to reinvent oneself.
But for Biust's character, Zoe and Simsion's character, Martin walking is a personal and not so united experience. She is grieving for her husband, who died only three weeks earlier. Whilst he is recovering from a messy divorce and a strained relationship with his teenage daughter.
Martin is also motivated by another reason: he's engineered a prototype of a buggy designed specifically for long-distance walkers and plans to sell it to a German company. The 85 day/three-month journey is designed, in his mind at least, to test the efficacy of the buggy over rough terrain.
Right from the get-go it’s obvious that our two pilgrims are not the best matches - always the plot of the best RomCom's. Zoe is a loud, upfront American (aren't they always?). Martin is a reserved English gent. She's a bit hippy-trippy and unsure if she truly wants to walk this trail. Martin, on the other hand is an obsessive, over-prepared - he's even marked out his route on a GPS. Zoe's on a limited budget and (at one point) must give massages to tourists to pay her way. He, on the other hand can afford fancy hotels and the best restaurants. Like I said - perfect RomCom material.
