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A Wheel of Fire
The Literary Cyclist: James E. Starrs. Breakaway Books, 1997. 390 pages
paperback, £11.95.
Shakespeare knew about suffering in the saddle: 'I am bound upon a wheel of
fire,' cries King Lear, 250 years before Kirkpatrick Macmillan put cranks on a
hobby-horse. Shakespeare isn't here, but fifty pieces about bicycles from
literature are, in this re-printing of a book first published in 1982 under the
more apt title, "The Noiseless Tenor". It's from Gray's Elegy in a Country
Churchyard and seems intended for cyclists:
He hadn't seen L'Alpe d'Huez in July. Anyway the earliest piece is from Mark
Twain, around 1889. Then there's Flann O'Brien's Third Policeman, in which
bicycles assimilate their owners' personalities (and even persons), passages
from H. G. Wells, Conan Doyle (Holmes fans will remember he and Watson tracking
a suspect over the moors by the tyre tracks), Somerset Maugham and others.
Alfred Jarry's bizarre account of the ultimate 10,000 mile riders fed on
'Perpetual Motion Food' will ring a few bells. Among my favourites are
Hemingway's brief encounter with the Tour du Pays Basque in The Sun also Rises,
and his account of the races he watched in the Vel d'Hiv around 1925. 'I must
write the strange world of the six-day races and the marvels of the road-racing
in the mountains,' he wrote. But he never did, and we're the poorer for it –
look what he did for bullfighting.
This is a widely varied and immensely enjoyable collection, and only costs as
much as you'd spend on seven copies of Cycling Weekly. Think about it.
Ramin Minovi
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