After last year's The Wildest Place on Earth, the caustic travel writer picked up his knapsack, pumped up his Peugeot and set out once again on the back roads. This time Mitchell cycled from the southern plains of Andalusia, in Spain, to Scotland's northernmost isles, chasing the encroaching summer in search of our only pantheistic deity, the sun. Appropriately, the text is most evocative in the indolent stretches of the sun-washed south, and Mitchell's penchant for reported speech offers a fascinating picture of Europe. His Spain is warm and effusive, his France lazy, rich and proud; England he likes less, and he struggles to find merit amid the smalltown claustrophobia of southern Albion. But the lonely wilderness and secluded hills of Scotland are most attractive to Mitchell, who prefers the company of his bicycle to that of other people. Awkwardly, it is Mitchell's preference for solitude that mars his typically generous prose, for he is surprisingly judgmental about other cultures and habitually moralizes about the laissez-faire lifestyles of his expat friends. Uncomfortable, too, is his almost overbearingly poetic narrative style, saved from whimsy only by erudite interjections on sun worship through time. This is a staggering journey, a spatial and temporal trek through centuries of heliocentric faith, where the author encounters everyone from New Age archeologists to luminist painters and naturalist bathers, united only in their adulation of the one true sun. (May)
