The Beautiful Machine: Graeme Fife. Mainstream
Publishing, 2007. 333 pages hardback, £16.99 ISBN978-1-84596-241-8
I ENJOYED THE first half of this book. Well-written
accounts of childhood and youth are usually attractive. Life at home
must have been misery for the young Graeme: his 5 ft 3 inch ex-army
father, bitter because he no longer had lower ranks to order around
and with a huge inferiority complex, took out his frustration on his
son in the form of frequent beatings. He escaped, and at school and
university he encountered cycling, rowing and girls, especially French
girls, taught in a couple of public schools, lived the life of a freelance
writing bum in London (ten addresses in as many months). So far, so
good.
A sixty-page account of a cycling trip to Timbuktu takes hold of the
reader because it's life on another planet, rather than because of superior
tale-telling; but the signs are creeping in, of over-writing and a belief
that absolutely everything that's ever happened to you should be retailed
to everyone else. I mean, if you don't tell them that your mate adjusted
your brake while you paid the hotel bill, how will they get through
their day? Around page 200 I found that enjoyment had pretty well ceased
and reading had become a chore. Then comes a rather tedious account
of the Raid Pyrenean (16 pages), followed immediately by another
one (13 pages) with his mates, obviously written for his club magazine.
It's written, says Fife, with a nod at Three Men in a Boat and
Three Men on the Bummel. I must be one of the few people who
thinks they're both tedious and dated, the humour heavy-handed and laboured
and, unfortunately, used as models by generations of would-be English
comic writers: 'Kevin … asked whether he was having a good time,
reflected for a while, took a gulp of lager, belched daintily, glazed
over and said: "What was the question?"' Hilarious. This was
worth writing and printing? It's not even worth thinking.
From here on it's downhill: name-dropping (boy, can he drop names) rides
in France and the UK, and a trip to New England in which he spends 17
lines, half a page, describing his choice of sandwich. He orders a beer,
and tells us that the barmaid asked whether he wants 'small' or 'tall'.
Every piffling thing that's ever happened to him has to be included,
along with verses and a song lyric.
Mr Fife is clearly well-read and fluent in French. But he's not a man
who wears his learning lightly and sometimes you think, 'Another dip
into Google, another visit to the encyclopaedia'. There are endless
unnecessary explanations of word and phrase origins (some of them wrong),
especially in French, a bit like those old boys' stories of Africa,
in which 'lion' and 'elephant' are given in both Swahili and English.
On page 252 he translates 'Merci' for us. But at lunch in the Pyrenees
we're given poulet and fromage de brebis untranslated.
Most English people can manage 'thank-you', but are unlikely to know
the French for 'ewe'. Fife's pedantry grows on him, until on page 279
he has a Lynne Truss-type storm (she wrote about how the English mangle
their grammar) about how Americans can't use subjunctives, but would
never say 12 p.m. And then, a few pages later, he uses 'nugatory' as
a synonym for 'negative'. Sorry, Graeme, when you start laying down
the law about people's language, your own has to be perfect - and anyway
life's too short for all this didacticism. And no, I won't tell you
what it means, you can bloody well look it up.
I suppose no writer can be blamed for recycling his work: several passages
are reproduced word for word from his Tour de France of 1999. While
less inaccurate than in this earlier book, he can still be careless:
Kelly's four Green Jersey wins were overtaken by Zabel (with six) years
ago, Mandy Jones won the World title at Goodwood in 1982, not 1985;
and he tells us, ludicrously, that 'infantry' originates with a Scottish
general who called his soldiers 'mes enfants'.
The last chapter, an account of cycling up and down hills in Kent, is
surely only of interest to a few locals.
Graeme Fife is reflective and perceptive. He can observe life, and then
write about it - a talent that's less common than you might think -
and there's undoubtedly a lot of good stuff here. What a pity his publisher
didn't employ an editor to reduce it by about a third.