The Fox's Walk

August 25, 2003
A pivotal few years in Irish history—1912–1916—as seen through the eyes of a sensitive 10-year-old girl, whose immediate focus is her own sense of abandonment by her parents, is the piercingly affecting theme of Davis-Goff's new novel. As in her previous books (The Dower House; This Cold Country), Davis-Goff brilliantly chronicles the vanished world of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Left behind at her grandmother's country estate when her parents return to Dublin, Alice Moore at first chafes with desperate loneliness, bewilderment and misery at the strict rules of behavior in force at Ballydavid, the result of her aristocratic grandmother's preoccupation with the unbending social code of the Ascendancy. Gradually, she comes to love Ballydavid, while becoming aware of the events that signal the approaching end of its privileged status. Her uncle is killed during WWI, and the family's mourning seems endless. Rebellion is brewing in Ireland, the Easter Rising occurs and Sir Roger Casement, a Protestant considered a traitor to his class, will be martyred. With deft assurance, Davis-Goff conveys the complex social order of the Anglo-Irish hierarchy, in which class, religion and political thought, heretofore complacently stratified, are undergoing vital challenges. As she traces Alice's growing maturation, the narrative's elegiac tone and graceful prose do much to overcome the necessarily factual interpolations of historical events. (Sept.)Forecast:Davis-Goff's previous novels earned excellent reviews. Her audience should increase with this book, particularly because it has a good hook for talk shows—much of the background is taken from an unfinished memoir by the author's mother.

May 1, 2003
Davis-Goff's This Cold Country and The Dower House were considered essential reading for lovers of romance and Irish literature alike. So one can have high hopes for this tale of a little girl's sojourn on her grandmother's estate in County Waterford during World War II.

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September 1, 2003
Davis-Goff continues to stake out her fictional territory--a milieu that is Anglo-Irish in the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in an elegiac novel based partly on her mother's life, the central character is nine-year-old Alice, who is left behind at her grandmother's house, Ballydavid, when her parents and siblings return to London after their usual summer stay. Despite the fact that World War I is raging and causes a terrible family loss, and Irish nationalists threaten the status quo closer to home, Ballydavid seems sheltered from the turmoil, in part because of Grandmother's implacable resistance to change. Alice struggles with her own need for love as well as with emerging insights about both the people round her and events in the larger world. The novel proceeds at a stately pace, much like Grandmother's lumbering and rarely driven Sunbeam. The interest lies in the sharply observed characters and in the sensitive child's-eye view of a way of life that was soon lost.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)