Storm: A Motorcycle Journey of Love, Endurance, and Transformation (Travelers' Tales Footsteps)

As a motorcyclist and adventure tourer, I had hopes for this book. I find it poorly written, tedious, unfocused. What to call it? It's not detailed enough to be travel writing, not deep enough for journal writing, not engaging in the least. The people and places are two dimensional and boring, and even the author's attempts to describe 'living hell" come across as "living heck." I find myself not caring what happens to the author and his traveling companion, nor would I want to visit any of the places that he describes, though I'm willing to believe that they could actually be interesting outside of the author's stewardship.


There are many good motorcycle adventure books (The Long Journey Home, Ten Years On Two Wheels, Chasing Che) to be had. This is not one of them.

I've been feeling trapped in a dull northeast winter and went on a buying spree of motorcycle travel books since I can't ride. I fully accept that most won't be that well written but they stave me over until the weather turns and I can resume my own travels. This book, however, stands on it's own merits and is a great read. Anyone who's ridden a trip when the "magic" just didn't work will relate to this couples differing ways of trying to recapture it - bail or forge ahead. The relationship dynamic keeps the book from being a "then we went here and saw this, then we went here and saw this..." like say Jupter's Travels, and it's also down to earth and not full of itself as say "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence". It relates the discovery of travel and touches enough on riding to appeal to both rider and non and he doesn't insult the reader along the way. I kept putting it down in an attempt to make it last longer.

This book is 1/2 travel journal, 1/4 relationship journal and 1/4 motorcycle journal. Noren's longtime girlfriend requires comfort (physical and otherwise) along with maturity, and riding a motorcycle through whipping rains and wind on dangerous roads, cars passing you at warp speed, provides none. The journey is an eye opener for him and a confirmation of his girlfriend's adult life needs. The passages describing the colorful European characters are great fun to read, while the relationship passages are just the opposite, albeit transposed in a good way. The ending leaves a bit of a tease. Noren's writing voice draws in any gender reader; he's not a macho Hog-riding hardass, nor is he the other extreme, "the sensitive male." There is enough of the relationship aspect to satisfy female readers, and enough of the description surrounds riding the bike, satisfying to motorcycle enthusisasts. If you enjoy reading motorcycle journeys, this is a good one, with some added aspects that others miss, making it entirely unique.

A friend gave me this book as a gift and it sat on my desk for several months. Admittedly I was put off by the motorcycling aspect, but I'm sad now that that stopped me from opening it sooner. Last Sunday night I was going to file the book in my bookshelf but decided to read the first page before I did so. Needless to say I couldn't put it down. It's a wonderful tale of adventure, a dream and its reality, love, and, yes, ego. The story transcends the motorcycle and in that way is much more than a biker book. The motorcycling aspects are excellent, however, because the author is not one of those leather clad oafs with a humongous midlife crisis on his back. Rather, the descriptions are beautifully written and invite the reader to feel what it was like too. Well done.

Storm
By Allen Noren

I am an avid motorcyclist, but I found this story very frustrating. It is not so much about motorcycling or traveling as it is about ego and obsession. The author is driven by his compulsion to complete The Trip, despite the horrendous, record-breaking stormy weather, over 6000 miles of northern European roadways. He presses on, focused on all the details of the challenge of coping with a bike in the most extreme weather conditions. But his girlfriend, the pillion passenger, has nothing to do but suffer. She has nothing to occupy her mind but resentment. Cold, wet, allergy riddled, bored, pissed, frustrated... this is what we see of her. She exists on this trip, to hear Noren tell it, like another natural curiosity to be observed while traveling, like the lakes, seasides, forests and of course the storms.

This book breaks down at the same place that their relationship breaks down. He is a rider, she is a passenger. Never will the passions of the two be comparable. Noren never gets to this point, though. The entire story is told through his obsessive self-centered perspective. We barely get a glimpse of her thinking, and when we do, it is interpreted through Noren's crazed compulsion: she betrays him by losing her connection to The Trip. But he avoids the point that a pillion passenger is passive and detached from the essence of motorcycling, with no control, and a feeling of literal and figurative coat-tailing to the rider. It IS his trip, and she becomes ever more an afterthought to him, as her alienation metamorphoses into her own obsession to have the trip just be over.

It is inevitable that the reader grows ever more sympathetic to her plight, and ever more convinced that he is little more than a neurotic jerk.

All that said, the writing is quite good. The book reads quickly. The style is engaging and the observations are unique and interesting. Noren does an excellent job of detailing the inner workings of a motorcyclists' mindset.... As our loved ones will attest, we are all a little obsessive, a little insane.

The lessons for me: avoid taking my wife on very long trips as a passenger (something I already knew). Make your mate get her own bike, so she can see the trip through the same eyes that you do. Oh, and buy good rain gear and heated clothing, too!