Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values tells the story of a man and his eleven year old son travelling across the USA on their motorcycle. Along the way, the father explains his thought and theories on various subjects, and a lot of ground is covered, on the motorcycle and in the thoughts of the father.

For the plot on this one, there is essentially 2 stories. The account of the trip across America on the motorcycle, and the story of the father trying to make sense of, and leave behind his past. The motorcycle trip is the thread which holds it together, and allows the father to explain his theories on various subjects, mainly Quality.

The main part of this book is the exploration of Quality. The narrator refuses to define it, explaining Quality cannot be defined, but people know when they experience it. This meditation on quality gets extremely deep, very complicated and goes off into metaphysics. Along the way we learn about philosophers, such as Hume and Kant, a whole lot bout the ancient Greeks and lots of other subjects, even a little bit about motorbikes. This thought process and expansion on the quality theme has led this book to be dismissed as pseudo-intellectual rubbish, but stick with it. There are lessons all over the place. Hopefully, some will stick and next time you are faced with an daunting or boring task, or get stuck on a problem, or start to lose some gumption, they will show their usefulness. The plot is good in this book, but it is not the draw or the main reason to read it. The reason it sold millions of copies, and continues to be praised all over the place, is the ideas and theories in it.

So the main things are the father's dark past, the motorcycle trip and the Quality thinking. But there's more branches  to this tree. Technology is mulled over, the American landscape is critiqued, the social landscape of America comes under the microscope, the problems with 20th Century civilisation are thought about, bits of Western and Eastern thoughts on philosophy are here, as well as many others I'm sure I'm forgetting. Nothing is shoe-horned in here, the writing and ideas flow from one to another, and at no point reading this did I feel lost or disorientated. Pirsig nudges the reader along, further and further down his rabbit hole, letting them have time to think and absorb it all. The heavy pages on philosophy or the Greeks are interspersed with the motorcycle trip and it means at no point does it all get bogged down. Pay attention to the motorcycle trip, and the weather and landscapes are often allegories for the other sides to the story that we are going through. High mountains and nice weather? Good progress will be made in the Quality theory. Dark cloud or fog? Things will not go well in the other story lines. This sounds simple when it is explained like this, but it comes together to make the book something special. 

So while there is famously little about Buddhist Zen here, and not a whole lot about motorcycles, I loved this book. It gave me a real sense of peace, and the end was strangely cathartic. No prizes for guessing the end before you get there, but when it comes it is supremely satisfying. This is one to read if you want something a bit heavier that you can think about after reading.