The Crossway by Guy Stagg (Picador) is a young man’s book. Written in 2013 when he was 25, it tells of his walk from Canterbury to Jerusalem in search of healing. Healing from what? It is never quite clear but, like many of his generation, well-educated but adrift in a society where there are seemingly no boundaries or immutable beliefs left, Stagg experienced a host of emotional and mental health problems before his walk: depression, panic attacks and temptations to suicide.
It is a young man’s book because it is full of ill-defined hopes, mad schemes, self-dramatization and over-writing – the historical information the reader is given along the way strikes me as unnecessary padding and the prose itself is too often self-consciously crammed with images when a simple statement would do.
