(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 10 May 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
Germaine, this book, in a sense, is crammed with different elements, different stories, snatches of this and that. Does it all thread together like some kind of long journey?

GERMAINE GREER:
I wish he wasn't so concerned to thread it together. The part of the book that concerned me was where we tried to explain the story.

It seems to me it's an absolutely classic picturesque novel. Its nearest parallel I can think of is Lazarillo de Tormes, where it seems things are barely possible.

It's at that level of unbelievability, and it's written in a style sufficiently concrete to make you actually entertain the mad notions of the egg inside the ant hill, and him with his half erection and all of that, or the mobile phone inside the condom being used as a vibrator and so on. It's just about possible, and you have to think, "Hang on."

KIRSTY WARK:
It's funny.

GERMAINE GREER:
Sometimes it is, especially when you have seen the joke coming for miles! Come on, come on, suddenly bang!

KIRSTY WARK:
The character of Tracy Trolley, the British rail trolley hostess, who gets fed up, jacks her job in and takes the trolley off, and they sit and drink. That story's true.

ALKARIM JIVANI:
I came to this an Alan Warner virgin anticipating an enjoyable deflowerment, and I was initially rewarded by this. I thought the way he bends language and syntax is great.

The way he coins new words was great. The way he describes landscape is wonderful, although sometimes it verges on self-parody. He describes rain as guts pishing from the side slashed belly of a pregnant cow, I did wince at that a bit.

There was a transition point about 120 pages in, about the luncheon party which didn't work for me. It was Irvine Welsh trying to do PG Woodhouse. Also, he tried the different forms of story telling, the story of a journey, the internal monologue, which didn't pull together for me.

MARK KERMODE:
I wanted to like this more than I did. I was looking forward to Lynne Ramsay's film. It's hard not to like any book he does, he is well-versed in films.

There is the point about many drownings and much fervent praying. Another point he talks about I know where I am going and he describes it as accidentally surreal.

For me, the problem with The Man Who Walks was that it was deliberately surreal. It felt like the quirkiness was being pushed too far.

At the beginning, there's a credit where he thanks people for writing to ask for more of the man. It does feels there is an incidental character from something else that has been taken and spread out during the novel and during the course of it has worn thin.

I don't think the ideas are strong enough to last the 270 pages, and therefore the quirkiness becomes too extreme. You said pushing it just far enough. I think it gets pushed too far.

GERMAINE GREER:
I think you are right, but all the changes and digressions are essential parts of this kind of writing. The other great figure is Stern. His problem is too many things have to happen, and it is too like Trainspotting.

You have to go from crash to crash to crisis, whereas I would have liked to have been on the road a bit more and tried to work out what just happened. You can't detach the nephew from the uncle.

MARK KERMODE:
It is suggested that they literally are the same person.

KIRSTY WARK:
It is a possibility that the nephew and the man who walks are the same person.

GERMAINE GREER:
It's not meant to be quite that confusing. He is a bit coy in his narrative style. When they start off, you wonder is he living in a caravan, is he a gypsy?

MARK KERMODE:
That starts to smack of obscuring the obvious, just being perverse for the sake of it.

GERMAINE GREER:
I think that's a kind of nervousness. I expect this man to write a great book, but it will be very different from this. He has to do all these physical jerks to get there, and he is nearly there.

There are some of the best moments in prose that I have read in a very long time. I will hang on to it because I just got so knocked about. Women are so vile in this book.

ALKARIM JIVANI:
I was told that in fact in his other books the women are much better delineated.

KIRSTY WARK:
He said that "the nephew was a misogynist, and I can't imagine how that happened because I am anything but".