Set in Silver — Story, Setting & Ideas

Voice and Duality

Audrie's narrative voice is a deliberate blend of her American father's 'Yankee cleverness' and her French mother's 'pocket combination of Somebody's Hundred Best Books.' She describes her mother as 'Romance, Practical Common Sense, Poetry, Wit, Wisdom, Fancy Cookery, etc., etc.'—a list that reveals Audrie's own tendency to categorize and embellish. Her letters are peppered with exclamations and rhetorical questions, such as 'can one's stays be a quality? Yes, if one's French—even half French—I believe they can.' This playful self-awareness extends to her descriptions of others: she imagines a village 'entirely populated by Eden Phillpotts people' and is disappointed when the moor folk 'even dropped their "h's".' The contrast between her romantic expectations and mundane reality becomes a recurring motif.

Landscape as Character

The Dartmoor section exemplifies how the authors use landscape to evoke mood. Audrie describes the moor's air as 'alive and life-giving,' tingling 'with a cold breath of the north.' The river Dart 'sings at the top of its voice,' and its moss-covered stones resemble 'whole notes and half notes' waiting to form a tune. This synesthetic approach—blending sight, sound, and smell—creates an immersive sensory experience. The tors are personified: Sharp Tor makes the river 'disappear at sight of it, hurrying away from its frown.' Later, a hill looks 'as if it might go straight through to China,' and the descent gives Audrie's toes 'a savage joy in the creepiness of it.' The landscape is not a backdrop but an active presence, shaping the characters' emotions and the narrative pace.

Humor and Self-Deprecation

Audrie's humor often undercuts her own romanticism. When she asks a boy the names of trees and receives 'H'ash and green h'elm, miss,' she calls it 'a blow.' Her disappointment at the ordinariness of moor folk is comically deflated. She also mocks her own physical reactions: after a steep descent, 'my toes felt as if they'd been done up in curl-papers for years.' The motorcar, named Apollo, is anthropomorphized with a 'chunk-chunked' sound that is 'nice, dependable.' This lighthearted tone prevents the travelogue from becoming ponderous, and it aligns with the epistolary form's intimacy. The humor is never cruel; it is directed at herself or at the gap between expectation and reality, making Audrie a sympathetic narrator.

Structure and Pacing

The novel's structure as a series of letters allows for varied pacing. Audrie's opening letter delays the 'Thing' she wants to discuss, building suspense through digression. She explicitly notes this technique: 'I think I'll talk about other things first. That's the way dear Dad used to do when he had exciting news.' This meta-commentary on narrative strategy gives the reader insight into the authorial choices. The journey itself provides a natural rhythm: travel, observation, and reflection alternate. Descriptions of scenery are interspersed with dialogue and incident, such as the encounter with the boy on the pony. The epistolary form also permits gaps in time, as letters are written after events, allowing Audrie to reflect and shape her story. This structure keeps the narrative fresh and avoids the monotony of a continuous travelogue.

Readers should attend to the interplay between Audrie's American directness and her French mother's influence, which colors her observations and self-presentation. The motor tour structure provides a framework for episodic encounters, but the real interest lies in how Audrie processes each scene through her distinctive voice. The authors use the letter format to create immediacy while allowing for retrospective commentary, a technique that rewards close attention to shifts in tone and pacing.

Reading Audrie’s letters from the road, I remembered a summer spent driving through Vermont, windows down, the landscape feeling like a secret I was keeping from my younger self. There’s a similar quiet companionship in the campfire conversations, where the murmur of voices and the crackle of wood become the truest measure of a journey. The Hunters' Feast: Conversations Around the Camp Fire — A Closer Reading brought that same unhurried warmth back to me, a feeling of being perfectly, pleasantly lost in time.