'The Invisible Mile' by David Coventry

What is it, at base, that enables us, or forces us, despite it all, the suffering, the mental cost, the weight of the past, the exhaustion, to continue? Do we come into being in the saddle in some endless Tour de France, our very existence, so to call it, such as it is, or more as it was, abraded by the sequence of present moments we struggle through? We can’t go on. We go on. We are muscle-bound, nearly crippled, deformed by the effort in our bodies and our minds, not much good for much else once necessity has had it way with us, clinging to that shrinking space of freedom, call it freedom, we hope we might inhabit, even briefly, should imperfections in the necessary overlap imperfections in the impossible. Not only all that, though all that would be enough, more than enough, to finish us off, we must stay on course, at speed, though memory threatens to overbalance us at every moment, both as a weight within, too highly set to be merely ballast, and as a hazard in the landscape through which we labour, a cross-rut pulling at our wheel whenever we expect it least. I have begun reading this exquisitely written, compelling and thoughtful novel set in the 1928 Tour de France, in which the New Zealand and Australian Ravat-Wonder team was the first English-speaking team to ride, and already I am greatly impressed by Coventry’s ability to control time by the deft manipulation of immediate detail and the restraint with which he applies the slow force of plot upon narrative, by his rapturously fresh sentences, by his ability to write successfully on a number of different levels at once, by his sublimation of metaphor to the thematic depths of the book, leaving the surfaces to pulsate against the darkness. “Speed is a thing. Though its measure is ratio, all else about it is malleable; remove your hand from the bars as you drop off a hillside and feel the thickness of the air, open your mouth and chew on its rubbery substance. The sky, the hills, the trees – they become rumours, then the whole world is a blur and you are the only stationary thing. That is speed.” 

May 2016