Fiction, Sport, Regulation
I've always found it hard to explain what sort of book "Walk the Line" is. It's not obviously part of a genre, though at a stretch you could describe it as historical fiction, and I hesitate to call it "literary".
The story follows a group of friends over four decades, broadly from 1968-2008, via two alternating strands. The first strand runs from July 2005 - the week of the London 7/7 bombings - to the end of 2008, while the second covers a series of disparate episodes in the characters' lives between 1968-2005. These episodes are arranged in sections - titled "Perspectives" - and are more loosely structured and much less linear than the first strand.
The novel's title refers to the various boundaries we navigate through life. Most obviously, it tries to explore the line between our internal and external worlds, and part of the genesis of the the novel is my fascination with understanding the world around us and how it shapes our characters and affects our personal choices.
But the novel also touches on boundaries in our personal relationships and in how we see ourselves compared to how others see us, while some other boundaries took on a life of their own through the writing process.
I've deliberately drawn the main characters - Sam, Michelle, Mary, Philip and Carol - only partially, and there are large gaps in what we know about them and why they change over time. This is because I don't, for the most part, believe in definitive character judgements. For me, we each see each other through our own lens and little is set in stone.