Clara’s Verdict
Rory Stewart is one of the most genuinely peculiar British writers currently working, and The Marches is the book that proves it most completely. Equal parts walking memoir, political meditation, father-and-son portrait, and historical investigation, it refuses every easy category that publishers prefer. Stewart traverses a thousand miles along the border between England and Scotland at a moment when that border carries enormous political and emotional weight – his father has just turned ninety, Scotland is about to vote on independence, and Britain itself is under sustained pressure. He reads his own book, and the effect is of a man thinking aloud about everything he has ever cared about. I found it completely absorbing, and I returned to certain passages more than once.
About the Audiobook
The walk begins as Stewart’s father approaches his ninetieth birthday, and sometimes they walk together, which adds a quietly elegiac quality to the whole undertaking. Stewart draws on his background – he was serving as MP for Penrith and the Border at the time, and had previously walked across Central Asia and Afghanistan for his earlier book The Places in Between – to bring both deep historical knowledge and clear-eyed political scepticism to the borderlands he calls home.
He is fascinated by the Roman Empire’s presence on this landscape – Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall, the imperial logic of boundary-drawing and the eventual failure of all such projects – and he draws uncomfortable parallels with more recent British history, including his own experience as an administrator in post-invasion Iraq. The portrait of his father, who served the British Empire in Asia for decades, gives the book an intimate human scale to set against its grand historical sweep. There is genuine grief lurking beneath the cheerful walker’s prose, and Stewart does not quite suppress it, which is to his credit as a writer. At 12 hours and 43 minutes, this is a book that rewards patience and repays careful listening.
One aspect of the book that rewards particular attention is Stewart’s treatment of his own political career. He writes as an MP with unusual honesty about the gap between the intentions of elected officials and the constraints of the institution, and the walks along the border function partly as a means of returning to a more honest and grounded understanding of the land he represents. The book was published in 2016, before Brexit had reshaped every conversation about Scottish independence and English identity, and reading it now adds layers of meaning that Stewart could not have anticipated.
The Narration
Stewart reads his own work, and this is unambiguously the correct decision. His voice is famously unusual – slightly donnish, quietly intense, with the cadences of someone who has spent years in diplomacy and Oxbridge seminars – but it suits the material perfectly. This is a reflective, personal book, and the slight awkwardness of the delivery underscores the impression of genuine thought rather than polished performance. He is particularly good at conveying the physical reality of walking long distances in difficult weather, and the passages where he and his father walk in companionable silence carry extraordinary warmth. A more polished narrator would smooth away exactly the qualities that make this audiobook special.
What Readers Say
Rated 4.4 out of 5 from 166 reviews, The Marches has attracted a thoughtful and appreciative readership. The most considered review describes it as “a wise and thoughtful meditation on his past, the region’s past, and history’s patchwork influence on the present,” noting how Stewart uses Roman history to reflect on British imperialism and personal memory in the same sustained movement of thought. Several UK reviewers note it as “a fascinating read” – high praise given British understatement. The book has also found appreciative readers in the United States, where the parallels with American experiences of empire and identity clearly register.
Who Should Listen?
This is ideal listening for anyone who enjoys travel writing with genuine intellectual weight – readers of Robert Macfarlane, Patrick Leigh Fermor, or Nan Shepherd will find much to appreciate here. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of the Anglo-Scottish border, in Roman Britain, or in the question of what British identity actually means in the twenty-first century. Given when it was written – on the eve of the Scottish independence referendum – it reads now as a document of a very specific historical moment, which gives it additional value. Listen on Audible UK: get The Marches on Audible UK. The book is equally suited to listeners who have no particular connection to Scotland or the north of England – the themes of history, landscape, and inherited identity are universal enough to travel. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, and Scribd. Stewart has since written further books and had a celebrated political career, but The Marches remains the work where his particular combination of intellectual ambition and physical commitment finds its most natural and satisfying form.
