Route One (2021)

Grief often includes our unspoken words. In grief we feel remorse for everything we could have said, but never put into words; words of both love and anger, words that awaited the opportunity to emerge from the subconscious but are now too late. The unsaid makes grief more painful, but is also perhaps the foundation of grief. Without our unspoken words, regret wouldn’t be as profound. Loss can be even more painful when it occurs while a loved one is still breathing, when they lose their memory and their memories of those closest to them; when the loved one dies a mental death in the presence of immediate family and passes away before the body has fully come to rest. This is, in part, the topic of this novel. The narrator is a young, homosexual man who has returned home from unfinished studies in the USA and a relationship with a man who had filled him with joie de vivre while the romance lasted. The book is written in the style of the road novel; the narrator and his father are on their way to the Glacier Lagoon on a camping trip. The father is seriously ill with a brain tumor and has a short time left to live… Even though the narrative structure is simple, a road trip which takes place over the span of a few days in correct chronological order, the narrator’s flashbacks and reflections of himself, and the people closest to him manage to successfully fill in the missing pieces of his and his family’s life. … The story’s structure is proficiently constructed … the novel’s greatest gift is taking readers on a journey through sorrow and the loss of a parent while avoiding the pitfalls of sappiness and self-pity. The inevitable death will not be mocked and in this story the narrator manages to process death in a moment when he believes his father is about to die and he is finally able to say everything he needed to say. Although the father may not have heard everything, if anything, we are reminded of the importance of uttering the unspoken words simmering beneath the surface, in order to come to terms with the death of our parents and to be able to determine the future of our own self.

The story is simple, beautiful and captivating, the text flows well. It makes the story accessible and easy to read. Additionally, it makes the reader think about what role words and silences play in interactions with loved ones.