Kris Ashton

One of writing’s golden rules decrees a protagonist should change over the course of a story, learning something about himself and the world around him. A road trip, such as the one that forms the plot architecture for Liam Murphy’s debut novel The Road Map of Loss, is the perfect metaphor for this journey of self-realisation.

The protagonist in The Road Map of Loss, Mark Ward, is a twenty-something sound engineer who works in a small-time Melbourne studio producing records for small-time musicians and assorted wannabe artists. Mark harbours a lot of pent-up rage towards his father, Dylan, who up and left Mark and his mother Celeste when Mark was five. Mark’s dissatisfaction manifests in a surly attitude and an increasingly out-of-control drinking problem. Adding fuel to his fury is frustration – Mark knows little about the motivations behind his father’s betrayal and wants his mother to help him understand. On the odd occasion she does venture to open up, she defends Dylan’s actions and Mark loses his cool, sending her back into her shell.

When Celeste passes away from illness, a grieving Dylan is fired for being drunk on the job. Going through his mother’s belongings with a view to selling her house, Mark finds a box of letters Dylan wrote to her after decamping from Melbourne and commencing his apparently aimless jaunt around the United States. Desperate to make sense of the resentment that has poisoned his existence, Mark flies to America, hires a rust-bucket sports car, and begins using his dad’s letters as a sort of handwritten itinerary try to comprehend his motivations.

“My father didn’t write about things that weren’t pretty,” Mark says. “He didn’t write about the traffic jams or sunburn or the mindless ticking of a million gas bowsers or the dark thoughts one has while being on the road.”

As Mark hops from bar to bar and woman to woman, leaving a string of good and generous people in his wake, one senses the apple has not fallen so far from the tree. Is he destined to follow in his father’s footsteps literally as well as figuratively?

At its core, then, The Road Map of Loss concerns a young man wrestling with daddy issues on an epic scale. The first couple of chapters have an off-kilter, trying-too-hard-to-be-literary quality, but once Murphy relaxes into his narrative groove he proves himself a gifted wordsmith indeed. He strikes a deft balance between textured visuals (some passages read like a Bill Bryson travelogue), creating entertaining set pieces, and moving the story forward, while inventive metaphorical language adds memorable highlights. Whether describing the myriad landscapes that constitute the backdrop to the novel’s restless storyline or simply blocking out action, Murphy’s prose is as smooth and rich as a good cup of coffee. And while Mark often indulges in philosophical musings, they’re seldom pretentious. This is literature, but it’s not literature of the plodding or navel-gazing variety.

Mark Ward is the angsty 1997 version of David Banner or The Littlest Hobo – he never hangs around for long – and while this prevents the narrative from stalling it’s also a weakness. Danny, a guy visiting New York for a buck’s night, befriends Mark immediately. Soon after, a group of roadies invite Mark to join their motel party. These interactions are plausible enough; a few drinks can, after all, make strangers fast friends and Mark has many drinks across the novel’s 355 pages. But when random people take an immediate liking to him again and again, in town after town, it stretches credulity. Mark’s apparently one hundred per cent strike rate in picking up women is also a little callow, more young man’s fantasy than anything resembling reality.

Perhaps more crucial, however, is that the reader knows next to nothing about Mark’s relationship with his father. Why did Dylan, a man with “one foot always out the door”, pull a disappearing act when Mark was five years old rather than five months or five days? What love was betrayed that could sustain a life-ruining rage for 20 years? Without this vital perspective, Mark’s anger seems baseless and overblown and his father’s florid letters superfluous beyond serving as a plot device.

Put simply, The Road Map of Loss is the debut novel from an author with a startling but still maturing talent. Murphy’s prose is already exquisite – many celebrated writers don’t have his skill with language or his ability to make a line flow frictionlessly through the reader’s mind while also tempting him to pause and admire its aptness, beauty or raw honesty. The characterisation, dialogue and story elements have a few rough edges, sure, but these will polish up with experience.

I have it on good authority this is not only Murphy’s first published novel, it is the first novel he ever wrote. To craft something this entertaining and thoughtful – not to mention publishable – on one’s maiden attempt is an astonishing feat, akin to a five-year-old picking up a bicycle with no training wheels and riding off across the park. Murphy signed a two-book deal with Echo Publishing, so his sophomore effort is in the pipeline. Keep an eye out for that one – it’s bound to be something remarkable.