Hallelujah Canyon - Richard Lightbody

Expect the unexpected. If you are seeking religious enlightenment, don’t be misled by the title, read something else – Hallelujah is more an expression than the route to salvation, although you could argue the whole story is about redemption. That’s not a spoiler. It points to a black comedy with huge shafts of light.

For many of those featured in the book life is black. They are blind, not bleak. It is hard to place the 400 pages into a genre; it’s comedy, it’s a crime story of sorts, it has a romantic sub plot, it is travel and sub-sequential trivia. If it were a movie it would be The Truman Show, meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with elements of Some Like It Hot and the Marx Brothers – a heady mix to get into one billposter.

Super author Bill Bryson was kind enough to read it. A confession, his thoughtful endorsement and encouragement is that of a friend, but Bill’s a literary genius and doesn’t use words without meaning them. You’d do so much better to buy one of his books, but he’s promised his family, a sabbatical away from any keyboards. There’s a gap in the leisure reading timetable.

Due to one bat in China, we might not get the opportunity to travel freely for a while, Hallelujah Canyon was a prolonged writing exercise, but strangely it might be a pointer to what future vacations might contain. Here you can go on an international journey like no other. The characters drawn from life, are disguised. It is a work of fiction, built on facts and experiences.

Today’s world is a complex compilation of cultures. This is a tale about a group of Americans, written by a Brit, from an island nation excluded again from Europe, proudly holding an Irish passport, driving a Japanese car made in England, married to a Dane driving a Korean car designed in Germany, addicted to Indian food, and revealing parts of an old and much trampled continent like you never imagined, without getting there – confused, read on.