The High Traverse

The High Traverse combines photographs, letters, images, and question, questions, questions to depict the dying moments of a human. The reader is drawn onward by several mysteries: the elusive Miss Wright, a primary school teacher who still fills the dying man's thoughts; the competition between the two brothers; the role the father played in World War II - and not least, just who is it who is dying? The father? A brother? Or is some part of all three, and of the grandsons too, inevitably dying? Too, the reader is drawn by the juncture of sensuality and death, a juncture that is disarmingly eased by the novel's seemingly grammar-school diction. Blanchard, himself a mountain climber, underlines this inquiry with stunning photographs and evocative images of mountains to evoke much of the myth associated with our final moments.