Key to the Highway – A Book Review
Key to the Highway
Author: Richard Andrews
Stride ahead seekers of the adventurous life. All is revealed through the lexis of moods, curves, imagination, sensations, and fantasies as Richard Andrews gives you his Key to the Highway, warning you to advance in the quest of your own ends; perpetually sentient that those you encounter have ends of their own.
While for many, this 194 page adventure saga may be a good bedtime or airport read, by the time I reached the dedication page to the author’s muse Marie – the Key to his ‘advent’rous Song’, for me, this book needed a setting. A campfire. Cool climes. Friends to share the tale with as if it were my own. Something I wasn’t about to get at the tail end of the muggy monsoons in Mumbai. So as the last day of September waltzed into Bangalore at a temperature of about 18 degrees but with a wind chill factor that made it feel closer to 15 degrees and a brisk breeze blew beer cans and snack plates asunder, I snuggled up on a gorgeous terrace under a clear sky, chilled to the bone yet surrounded by the warmth of my people, my tribe, that rare inner circle who understand you well enough to allow you to cosy up with a book in the middle of a party and just occasionally interrupt you for titbits or to feed you. There I was enveloped by a mesmerising oasis of terrace lights, finally captivated by a book that has a certain je ne sais quoi, a sense of something other, another place and time, a listicle of myths and truths.
As a journalist, the author has lived a life filled with some pretty amazing stories. Having experienced things that most people have probably only read or thought about, the tales in this book, of protagonist Chris Hunter, are as astounding as they are baffling and can leave the reader a tad flummoxed at times. From his hometown Australia to the energetic Kuala Lumpur to exotic and noisy India to Bangkok, Borneo, Brazil and beyond, astride a motorcycle, aboard a ship, along dirt roads, and across blue skies, Chris’s story constantly echoes a line said to him at the end – “Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.”
The discovery of a mystical blues playing mouth organ (harp) breaches the borders of the fantastic and takes the reader on a trip; first with Chris and his band and later as he flies solo around the world. His motorcycle flies across roads that are physical and metaphorical in a seemingly impossible move toward mythological egalitarianism, as he encounters gods and goddesses, demons and angels, warriors and bullies from across the folkloric spectrum. Music doesn’t just pepper each event. It runs through them all like a thread through a needle such that everything that Chris does or faces is stitched with its colour.
Hedonism, profligacy, and different sensory experiences come alive within the pages of this book. Characters, albeit not written to be stopped and admired, force the reader to do so as they move as though they are enthused by the urgency that only turning a page to know more ushers in. There is fervour and craze in their attitudes, and they are stimulated by life’s moods and motivated by its rhythm and beat. Each chapter and each person who is a part of it has been crafted carefully, as grandiloquent scenes unfold in a manner which has happened naturally and without force.
As I turned page after page in that one sitting, and as the earth turned toward the sun, the one thing that stood out for me was that the open road is to the wanderer what the hearth is to the settler. For a character like Chris Hunter, the creative ember so fundamental to his work and life, is inseparable from the fact that he is constantly on the move. Everywhere and nowhere, at home in the world, he soaks up inspiration from the places he visits and in which, sometimes, he chooses to stay a while. The rest of the world looks askance at him, “Where have you been and where are you bound?” This world and all its labels are calling. I’m sure he’d love to answer. But he’s moving so fast, he can’t hear a thing! In Key to the Highway Richard Andrews has narrated an almost autobiographical tale; where fate or rather its more flamboyant relative destiny persistently taunts both protagonist and reader alike with Smirnoff’s iconic campaign – “Life is calling. Where are you?”
*Available for purchase on Amazon India
(Published in musicunplugged.in on October 15, 2023)
© Ayesha Dominica
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