A delightful combination of chick-lit-style road adventure and fictionalised travelogue, Footprints In The Sand by Sarah Challis is the next best thing if you are unable to throw on your backpack and head for Africa this instant.
Feeling vague about Mali? If the mention of Tuaregs, a music festival in the desert, Dogon masks, or the world’s largest earthen building (in the UNESCO world heritage site of Djenné) don’t ring a bell, remember the villainous Edgar of Aristocats who was shipped off to Timbuktu? Much too good a fate for him, if you ask me. Hopefully, as it did for one of the protagonists of Footprints In The Sand, Mali inspired a life-changing epiphany.
When cantankerous, Harrods-loving Great-Aunt Mary dies, her will tasks two twenty-something relatives, cousins Emily and Clemmie Kingsley, with a mission that stuns the Dorset farming family: scatter her ashes in the Malian portion of the Sahara desert.
Clemmie is enchanted by the prospect of the adventure of a lifetime, but Emily balks. Miserable in the wake of her breakup from an unfaithful boyfriend, the last thing she wants is to chase another illusion. Nobody has ever heard of the location Great-Aunt Mary’s will mentions, nor suspected she had any connection to Africa: what if the eccentric idea was an attack of senility? Beryl Timmis, Mary’s companion, is of no help in puzzling out the mystery; silently she hopes nothing will come of the affair. But Clemmie overcomes every objection, and as her best friend, Emily reluctantly gives in. Now the only question that remains is how they will hunt down a place that does not exist on any map – and in the process of unravelling Mary’s secret, try to figure out the unspoken responsibilities of friendship.
As I devoured Footprints In The Sand, mental images from a completey unrelated film kept popping up in my head. The snappy, humorous exchanges between optimistic idealist Clemmie and practical skeptic Emily reminded me of girlfriends Mary McCormack and Minnie Driver in the British crime-comedy High Heels And Low Lifes. (Driver and McCormack have great chemistry, the quirky-never-a-dull-moment plot and dialogue crackle with energy and fun, and the ending is sassily upbeat. Just thinking about that film makes me grin.) The dynamic between the women, the British origin of both film and book, the pursuit of a madcap undertaking, and the positive focus on female friendship are probably the only similarities between book and film. Except that in my head, Emily and Clemmie now look and talk like Driver and McCormack (and yes, I realise the latter is American).
Footprints In The Sand starts out rather conventionally, but the chatty warmth and immediacy of the narrative style kept me entertained until the story gathered steam with the revelation of Great-Aunt Mary’s request. Despite the mystery at its heart, the plot is on the thin side, yet absorbing and not entirely predictable. What propelled me to turn the pages with unflagging curiosity were the quixotic nature of the mission, the character revelations, the emotional secrets, and the fascination of discovering Mali. Sarah Challis’s flair for painterly metaphors and illuminating detail are a joy and proved a saving grace when the cousins’ road trip from Bamako (Mali’s capital) temporarily strayed into the territory of enthusiastic travelogue.
The front cover of my edition of Footprints In The Sand has the following line: What happens when you finish someone else’s journey? The inner journeys of the characters parallel the cousins’ travel expedition. At the same time, this is not a new age tale replete with mystical life lessons. Emily and Clemmie’s personalities and their attitude to the country they are travelling through infuse the tone with breezy humour and self-irony, ensuring that moments of darker emotion never bog the story down in self-important melodrama. Any messages are left for the reader to infer.
The story is alternately narrated by Emily and Clemmie, with brief, at first seemingly random, but actually crucial insertions by Beryl Timmis. The two younger women’s casually confident voices are clearly distinct from the anxious strain of Beryl’s, whose account gradually develops into an unsettling counterpoint to the cousins’ adventure. In segments where plot development takes a back seat, their different outlooks provide a tension that kept me fully absorbed in the story.
Perceived by others as a timid spinster frightened of her own shadow, Beryl Timmis is treated with absent-minded indulgence. With Mary’s death and shock of a request, the past comes back to haunt Beryl. As Clemmie and Sarah travel to Africa, Beryl, now installed in a first-class retirement home thanks to Mary’s generosity, travels back in memory to the secrecy-laden turning point in her and Mary’s lives. Beryl’s internal monologue reveals a side of which others seem oblivious: self-pity centred around a selfish, critical kernel that retains little sweetness and only feigned dottiness. Gradually, through memories she has unsuccessfully tried to repress, an increasingly disturbing picture emerges. While Clemmie and Emily literally journey through sunshine, Beryl’s fears in winter-gloomy England lurk like chill shadows at the edges of the main tale.
Clemmie is Beryl’s opposite. Bubbling with enthusiasm, she sees the best in every person and finds the silver lining in any situation. In England, she has been drifting through life without clear focus, not unhappy, but dreaming of something special that will show her what life should be about. Her acceptance of the here and now makes her more easily contented than Emily, and her open nature seems to invite miracles. Situations Emily suffers through with boredom or worry are just as likely to be sources of meditative reflection and serenity for Clemmie.
Emily views her cousin’s impetuousness with a mix of grumpy exasperation and sisterly fondness. An elementary school teacher who is struggling to come to terms with her breakup with a longtime boyfriend, she sees the trip not as an adventure but a series of challenges, and is repeatedly on the brink of resigning herself to the potential failure of their mission. The Sahara desert tests her to the extreme, and the question becomes whether history will repeat itself.
A strong theme evolves through the contrasting and complementing friendships of Mary and Beryl versus Emily and Clemmie: even well-meaning meddling with an individual’s power to choose her/his own way can kill a spirit and give rise to a lifetime of regrets.
Mali transforms the cousins’ perception of the world and of themselves, and their meeting with locals who become guides and friends turn their unconventional task into something resembling a pilgrimage. While Challis’s admiration for the country (which she has personally visited) is evident and she pokes gentle fun at Western tourists, she deftly avoids the cliché of painting the place as an African Shangri-La. Footprints In The Sand is not interested in offering an analysis of cultural otherness (at least not directly; it is discoveries of sameness that most often fascinate the two women). Even so, while the story may not dive very deeply beneath the surface glamour of exotic travel – rough-and-ready though the actual mode of travel may be – Emily and Clemmie do experience an uncomfortable awareness of the exploitative side of tourism in a poor country. “I did not enjoy being a sightseer and neither did Emily. With nothing to offer, nothing to give, we were just gawpers from another world.” (Page 269.)
My enjoyment of Footprints In The Sand was such that few flaws bothered me. As different as Beryl’s voice is from those of Clemmie and Emily, this difference was liable to evaporate when it came to certain instances of descriptive imagery. Instead of Beryl’s fussy negativity, Clemmie’s cheerful optimism, or Emily’s skepticism, I would suddenly hear the author being unable to resist inserting a particularly labored-over passage whether or not it fit the character’s thought pattern or voice. Each time it happened I was pulled out of the character’s head for a moment.
One thing remained unclear to me at the conclusion of the story. I can only try to guess at why Mary selected Clemmie and Emily rather than someone else from the large Kingsley clan. Perhaps the cousins’ friendship inspired Mary to try to write a new ending for the past? Perhaps she wanted to open up the truth in the hope that someone might finally understand her, someone who might gain something equally life-changing from it? I don’t know, but neither does it matter much to me since it detracts nothing essential from the story.
Finally, I have seen some otherwise satisfied readers grumble about the ending being “sappy” or “silly”. Those less allergic to romantic story elements should be aware that the romance that occurs is an end result – the expression of a spiritual (as distinct from religious) homecoming – not a subplot.
Footprints In The Sand was recommended by Mog, and I am so glad I listened! Reading it proved an undiluted pleasure and the most charming armchair trip I took all summer.
Excerpt
(Headline Review, paperback, 2007, page 86-88):
“Although I had agreed to go to Mali with her, there was still one conversation I felt we had to have.
‘Okay, Clem,’ I said, taking a deep breath, ‘let’s get this clear from the start. If we get out there and find that we can’t make contact with this man of Great-Aunt Mary’s, this Salika person, then that is it. We find a suitable place to scatter the old girl and we call it a day. I’m not going wandering off on our own in the Sahara. You’ve got to know what you are doing in an environment like that and you’ve got to be with people you can trust. I looked up Mali on the Foreign Office travel advice page this afternoon. Look at this!’ I handed her a printed sheet and waited while she skimmed through it.
‘I know all this,’ she said airily, handing it back. ‘Will told me. But they always exaggerate, don’t they? They try and put you off going anywhere but the New Forest or a coach tour of the Lake District.’
I picked up the sheet and read out, ‘Because of increased risk of banditry and kidnap we advise against travel to the north of Timbuktu. Bandits and smugglers across the borders of Mali, Mauritania, and Algeria constitute a real risk to travellers, especially after dark.’
Clemmie had picked up a hand mirror and was studying an imaginary spot on her face, refusing to meet my eye. Instead she said, ‘Emily! Pick up that free local paper on the table. What’s that on the front page? Muggings? A rape? In one week, and in this neighbourhood alone. London is a million times more dangerous than Mali, where crime levels are actually really low. It says so if you read on a bit. Anyway,’ she said, putting down the mirror and looking at me brightly, ‘wouldn’t it be blissful to be kidnapped by those camel men? It would beat teaching, wouldn’t it?’
I shook my head. Sometimes Clemmie’s remarks are too silly to merit an answer. On the other hand, she was probably expressing her real opinion. It would be typical of her to think that it would be exciting to be kidnapped.
‘It would be a big mistake on their part,’ I said. ‘Who do you think would pay the ransom? I can’t see the Kingsleys forking out to get us back.’
‘Isn’t it said,’ said Clemmie, ‘to be so superfluous?’”
A book of related interest: As far as I have been able to find out, Clive Cussler’s Sahara was published in 1992, the year Mali was holding its first democratic presidential election. Thus its description of a fictional dictatorship instantly dated the novel, as do the descriptions of violent rule and rampant corruption. USAid now considers Mali one of the most stable countries in Africa. With that it mind, Sahara (and its film adaptation) becomes a book best read as a fantasy adventure rather than a tale grounded in reality.
Edited to add (13 June 2011): An intriguing romantic novel also set in the Sahara, The Salt Road by Jane Johnson takes a much closer look at Tuaregs. I have posted about it here.
