The world, and everything around it, will one day turn to dust. Every living thing will someday die, as will the sun and the universe around us. In “The Highwayman” by Koren Shadmi, follow an unnamed, ageless protagonist over the course of centuries, learning more about him, and in the process, watching the world deteriorate around him.
Written and Illustrated by Koren Shadami
Forever on the move, Highwayman travels through the vastness of North America searching for the source of his condition. He suffers from a strange, seemingly incurable disease: immortality. Bound to the road and at the mercy of whomever will give him a ride, he encounters people who reflect the rapidly changing world around him. Moving through centuries of change, he watches humanity’s precarious trajectory towards an unknown future.
The main character of “The Highwayman,” who is unnamed for most of the book, looks almost alien. He is tall, taller than almost any other character in the story. Shadmi draws him with a long, oval face, his mouth and eyes far apart, only connected by the long, stretched out nose that takes up most of the length of his face. One of his pupils is a tiny pinprick, while the other is huge and dilated. While all the characters in “The Highwayman” are stylized, there is something about the main character that sets him apart. He is in the world around him, but not involved in it. He is just traveling, the rest of the world happening as he passes by.
“The Highwayman” is split into seven chapters, each chapter its own individual story. Between the chapters, there are large stretches of time. It isn’t always clear how long, with the first chapter taking place during World War Two, and most of the rest stretching off into the distant future. Each chapter has its own simple color scheme, with chapters dominated by everything from dour blues to sun drenched yellows, burnt oranges to strange greens.
Shadmi’s use of color creates separation between these chapters. Each of them has a slightly different mood and feeling, and these changes in colors are able to better delineate the large gaps of time. Even more than that, though, the color pallet works to show that not only have huge gaps of time passed between each chapter, but the world itself has changed. The world that is presented in chapter one, of a place very much like our own 1940s, is drenched in rain and deep blues. The next chapter is full of washed out browns and yellows, a desert that has never seen that kind of rain, and a future that likely hasn’t in many years.
It’s details like that which are able to make “The Highwayman” so evocative. There is never any real explanation of the state of the world in any of the chapters. But while reading, you understand how the world is moving forward. The ways in which the environment is changing, and the way in which people have adapted to this. Each chapter, taken separately, is an amazing example of world building, creating what is almost a new world for each chapter, the only real constant being the main character.
Despite the disparate worlds shown in each chapter, when taken as a whole, “The Highwayman” tells a compelling story about environmental collapse. While the protagonist does show some change throughout the book, it is the world itself that is the most dynamic character. We see it become more and more uninhabitable, and no matter the inventions of humanity, it continues to fall into disarray.
This could easily be read as a cautionary tale about global warming, and the dangers of allowing our environment to fall into complete disarray. However, “The Highwayman” doesn’t actually have much to say about humanity’s role in the destruction of Earth. It is focused instead on the fact that, no matter what humanity does, it will eventually die. Whether through our own actions, or through the natural process of the universe, Earth will eventually become uninhabitable. “The Highwayman” is more interested in grappling with the large, philosophical questions of whether it’s worth it to stick around and see that eventual destruction or get out before things completely fall to ruin.
This is both a positive and a negative for the book. It’s evocative, asking big questions about life, about transience and the connections that are formed between people. But it shirks any questions about humanity’s own role in its eventual destruction. Of course, not every piece of science fiction has to be a cautionary tale, and I’m not advocating for “The Highwayman” to be turned into some kind of sermon on the dangers of climate change. But it does feel like there is something missing in this story, that it involves the destruction of Earth, but doesn’t care much who caused that destruction.
“The Highwayman” is, at the end of the day, a beautiful book. It is a meditation on being, a story about the way society can change and crumble, and the things that humanity could do to survive. It’s a story about one man, living solitary, driven to continue moving no matter the world around him. It tells all of those stories beautifully. “The Highwayman” is a book that sits with you after you’ve finished reading it. But, the longer it sat with me, the more I wondered whether it could have said more, if the story being told could have been more than evocative into something more specific, more moving. However, if you are able to be satisfied with evocative, “The Highwayman” is a book that is worth checking out.
