Timeblog.net

Neil Peart ist the best drummer in the world.
Now that needed its own paragraph But he is, and he is the drummer of RUSH, a band that has not released a single album that was not really good, yet gently changed the way the play a number of times. I saw them live last year, they were fantastic.

But this book is not about Neil Peart, the drummer. It’s a book he wrote in 2004, putting notes together he wrote on his travels some years before. Tragedy had struck him hard, his daughter had died in a car accident. Only half a year later, his wife died. “The doctors called it cancer, but of course it was a broken heart”, Peart writes. After being an hermit for several months afterwards, he packed up his motorbike and started traveling. He soon called it the healing road, as it was helping him to survive. He called himself the Ghost Rider, as it was only a ghost of himself traveling. This book is about his travels.

He starts traveling through Canada, 700 or 800 or 1000 km a day. He has to keep on traveling just to survive. He travels for months and months, all through Canada, the USA and later Mexico, “one step forward, one step back”. His recollections are beautfiul, for the first 100 pages you can’t put away the book. Peart writes beautifully, he visits wonderful places, yet he is completely devastated.

The book also contains a large number of letters, mostly to his friend and traveling buddy Brutus, who was sent to jail just shortly after Peart sets out, yet another tragedy as he thought they could travel together later on. They couldn’t. The middle of the book is a bit too long, maybe even a hundred pages. Nothing new happens, it is mostly just filled by letters, a didn’t read every word in there but skipped a paragraph from time to time. The thorough descriptions of the places and the anecdotes here are fewer and it’s more letters.

At the end of the healing road, more than a year later after he set out, you can see how Peart manages to get back on his feet. It’s glorious moments when he secretly starts drumming again, and finally gets back into life. But you also learn how hard his way was, how many setbacks. There are some funny moments, like when he starts hunting squirrels with a water pistol or when he wanders through a national, singing all the time to keep the bears away.

His writing style is like the man himself, quiet, dedicated, very talented, always with a little smile. A book heartly recommended, if you can live with a few pages or letters too much.