Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Dramatised)

I love this story and how it makes you revaluate so many things

It took me a long time to give this audio version of the book, a go. I knew enough about the book to know that I would never get to grips with it in written form, and so when the opportunity arose to listen to it, I decided to give it a go. After all it has been described as 'exciting' and a 'masterpiece'!In its favour: the production values are, as is often the case with BBC productions, very high. The accompanying unintrusive music and the sound effects are sympathetic and help with mood and atmosphere, and the voices are easy to distinguish - the latter not being always achieved these days, even by the BBC.Against, from my perspective: I could not see where it was exciting. The scenes changes kept on intruding and whereas one minute, the main character [Phaedrus - dad] was in hospital and the next, climbing a mountain. One minute his son, a very [understandably] confused young man, was laughing and joking with Phaedrus and the next, he couldn't stand him. The main character talks to himself much of the time, in the third person, which did not assist my understanding, and his lapses into silence when people spoke to him was a little off putting. The only part of this philosophical exercise that I understood, was when as a university tutor, he tried [and I think succeeded] in persuading his students not to look for pass marks for their work, but to judge their own work to see if it was up to the mark. He seemed to have an epiphany on the issue of the quality of life, but then perhaps, he did not!In truth my negativity stems from one of at least, the following reasons: I became confused which led to my attention wandering as to the characters, places and quite often, the points being made. Why? because I am a lazy reader/listener who requires a peg, i.e a plot or some practical information or purpose that the author wishes to achieve. Here there was, as far as I could tell, no plot. But then why would there be, if the whole point of the book is a philosophical discussion. Perhaps the book is badly written. I discount this because so many people have read it and given it high marks. I admit then I didn't get to the end, on the premise that life it too short. But where did the maintenance of motorcycles come into it?Don't take any notice of me. I will stick to biographies.

The ageing baby-boomer demographic of the core Radio 4 audience makes it a shrewd move to transmit this filleted version of a 1960s cult classic. But this is a demanding listen, requiring complete concentration. And, for me and possibly other listeners, its structure of road movie plus father/son bonding trip now suffers somewhat from comparison with Cormac McCarthy's more intellectually coherent and emotionally wrenching, "The Road."The original functions on many levels - journey of self-discovery, philosophical treatise, road trip and study of recovery from insanity. It is hardly surprising that this highly abridged dramatisation focuses on the narrator's dysfunctional relationship with his son, who has been severely traumatised by his father's breakdown and hospitalization.It does take a while to figure out what it going on, and once that's done, it seems that the answer is "not very much." The story is told in a series of flashbacks piecing together the writer's academic career, which ends badly when he confronts his professor at Chicago University about what he percieves as society's refusal to temper classical rationalism with a more passionate and romantic world-view. In the original, this conflict is painstakingly built up through lengthy philosophical monologues, and it's never entirely clear how many of the scenes depicted are taking place inside the character's own head. The dramatic complexities of this narrative approach are something of a challenge for the adapter, particularly in a mere two hours, so inevitably the production loses something of its intellectual subtlety in favour of the more emotional storyline of whether Chris and his dad can fix their relationship.This aspect of the story is handled very well, with strong performances on both sides, though the final resolution is rushed and somewhat unconvincing. For the father to deny he was ever truly insane may satisfy us on an intellectual level (the philosopher hero wins out against an uncomprehending and deluded world), but it also seems to cheapen the very real suffering the young boy has gone though in seeing his father confined in a mental institution. Another loss is the lengthy passages in the original describing the importance of grounding activities requiring mental and physical skill (represented by the actions of maintaining a motor cycle, but part of a much wider social critique in the book). This isn't addressed very deeply, and I think an unfortunate result is that we don't see the grounding activities that have kept the hero, who is prone to over-abstraction, on the right side of sanity since he began to recover.So, an interesting trip down memory lane for some of us, but only partially successful in capturing the spirit of the original. Perhaps it works best for those who can draw on their memories of youthful reading to fill in the gaps.