The Invisible Mile, by David Coventry

Title: The Invisible Mile
Author: David Coventry
Publisher: Picador (UK) | Victoria University Press (NZ) | Europa Editions (US)
Year: 2015
Pages: 312
Order: Pan Macmillan (UK) | VUP (NZ) | Europa (US)
What it is: A literary cycling novel re-imagining the 1928 Tour de France, which featured a French-sponsored team made up of three riders from Australia and one from New Zealand
Strengths: Some powerful and beautiful writing
Weaknesses: A simple idea made complex when what you really want from writing like this is a complex idea made simple

"I arrived in Canterbury, the flat lands and the unerring sky. It was 1921 and the sun bore holes in my eyes and shrank the lakes to salt mineral. At Timaru I borrowed a bike in borrowed shoes and raced in the dust storm ripping from the tips of the Alps across those dry plains to the side of the sea. The road was planted in the centre of the wind. The air shaped into a tunnel, at times narrowing to draw us towards the edge of speed, at others to wreck us in a swift twist of dirt and heat. It was a brute summer that could only be imagined.

"For 100 miles I paced beside men and older men, each of them breathing hard and some in the throes of a cough, rough patches of voice when they called out. We ran across creeks where there were no bridges, we scrambled in the dust as it rose around us, searching for the road, and when there was no road we ran in the mud, our bicycles held high above our heads. No man was free until he quit. The first run of the Classic since that rail car on the outskirts of Compiègne. I knew nothing of the men I rode beside."

So opens The Invisible Mile, debutant Kiwi novelist David Coventry¹ delivering a take-your-breath-away blow to your solar plexus with the power and beauty of his writing. Three hundred pages of this await you. A joy that can only be imagined.

Why then, by the time I finally got to the end of The Invisible Mile, did I find myself disappointed?

* * * * *

The Invisible Mile tells the story of the 1928 Tour de France. It was the twenty-fifth anniversary Tour, the twenty-second edition of the race and only the second Tour to feature Australian riders². But the first to feature a (French-sponsored³ and French-bossed⁴) Antipodean⁵ team made up of Australians Hubert Opperman, Percy Osborn, and Ernest Bainbridge⁶ along with New Zealander Harry Watson (the Tour's first Kiwi). The first, in fact, to feature an Anglosphere team⁷, a quarter of a century (plus) before the first British team⁸, nearly six decades before an American team featured in the race⁹ and more than eight decades before the next Australian team featured¹⁰.

As Tours go, the 1928 edition is an oddity, very, very far from our understanding of what early Tours looked like. The previous year, as a response to what he felt was the laziness of the trade teams, Henri Desgrange had introduced a new rule: on the flat stages there would be no peloton rolling along at touring pace and only stirring itself for the gallop to the line. Instead, these stages would be contested as team time trials. For the 1928 race that meant that stages one through eight and 15 through 21 were contre-la-montre, and only in stages nine through 14 (two stages in the Pyrénées, a transition stage and three stages in the Alps) and the final gallop to Paris would be raced in the normal fashion. Opperman - the most senior of the Ravat-sponsored Antipodean riders - reportedly called it "a crime that should never have been perpetrated on the roads of France."

The field in 1920s' Tours generally being about one quarter trade teams / top riders and three quarters touristes routiers, Desgrange sought to level the playing field somewhat by organising some of the touristes into regional squads. In a further concession to that quaint French concept of le fair play the Father of the Tour deigned to allow the teams to call in substitutes, either fresh squad members¹¹ or riders who had previously dropped out¹².

It was, basically, a Tour you would not recognise today. It was also boring beyond belief. Luxembourg's Nicholas Frantz, who had won the previous year, started the race wearing the maillot jaune and never once surrendered it, not even to one of his Alcyon team-mates. Two of whom filled the lower steps of the podium come Paris. The fourth rider home was an Alcyon-surrogate, from the affiliated Thomann squad. The only real high-point of the race came as the riders headed toward the Ardennes, Frantz wrecking his bike and having to complete more than 100 kilometres of the stage on an ill-fitting ladies bicycle.

Team-mates André Leducq and Nicolas Frantz (right) toast their successes during the 1928 Tour de France

The Ravat team at the 1928 Tour de France

Those, then, are the basic facts of the race. All of which you can immediately forget. For The Invisible Mile is not really the story of the 1928 Tour de France. Coventry takes the basic facts of the race and then - as Dave Thomas did in his novel set during the 1911 Tour, The Great Loop - discards them to tell a wholly different tale. The story of an imagined fifth member of the Ravat team, an anonymous second Kiwi, whose brother saw service in France during the war. And the story of the ANZACs¹³ at war and after the war. Both stories in service to a core message about history and remembrance.

Coventry has said that the book is "about trying to write about the war, trying to remember the war." He has also described the novel as "the act of remembering, as the narrator keeps moving towards the moment when he tries to remember what his brother went through." These being not atypical subjects for writers, there's a feel to The Invisible Mile that it is in places writing about writing. Using cycling as a backdrop to do this, we've been here before, Tim Krabbé and Uwe Johnson both told their stories using writers as their narrators, versions of themselves, and dwelt on issues to do with their craft. Coventry, however, chooses for his narrator the son of a doctor¹⁴ who appears to have no career outside of cycling. Some of his thoughts just don't feel like they should be his. Exhibit A: "This race, it goes on. A sentence unwinding in the hills." Exhibit B: "I stood balanced with my feet shifting the cranks back and forth minutely. Still moving, still in the race, still a verb in this sentence." Exhibit C: "An hour folds in on itself as if in the blackened hands of a typesetter compiling the words as we speak, making the octavo fold before the cut to make the page." Poetic such similes may be but do they belong to the character or the author?

This, I think, is where I lost faith in Coventry's story-telling: none of his characters feel real, blood and flesh, body and bone. They all feel like literary constructs, stilted by their brutalising servitude to the novel's core message, disconnected from story, disconnected from any semblance of reality, functioning only to stiffly mouth ill-fitting words about the remembrance of things past. So false do they seem, in fact, that at times the whole thing feels like another story opportunistically shoehorned into the framework of the 1928 Tour, neither benefiting from their enforced cohabitation.

As a novel about cycling - it would be more proper to describe it as a psychological novel than a cycling novel - The Invisible Mile suffers from the same affliction that drags down so much Tour-related fiction: everything is dialled up to eleven, with no cliché left unwielded. When Desgrange's mythic comment about the ideal of singularity¹⁵ got trotted out I felt like dropping the book and shouting "House!" so effortlessly does Coventry fulfil the needs of Tour cliché bingo. The amping things up, Coventry takes as his epigraph Henri Pélissier's much repeated comment to Albert Londres in that café in Coutances¹⁶ ("Nous souffrons du départ à l'arrivée.") and proceeds to treat the Tour as a symphony in suffering, relentless, each stage blending into the next in a prolix paean to pain, suffering and even death.

And yet, for all his suffering, Coventry's hero never seems to rest, spends many of his evenings either carousing à la Ernest Hemingway's País Vasco riders¹⁷, or in the company of the novel's femme fatale. He's with her in Caen at the end of stage one, (briefly) in Brest at the end of stage four, in Vannes at the end of stage five (where they watch the dawn rise over Carnac's menhirs), in Luchon at the end of stage nine, in Perpignan at the end of stage ten, in Nice at the end of stage eleven, in Grenoble at the end of stage 13, in Évian at the end of stage 14, in Metz at the end of stage 18, in Charleville at the end of stage 19 (another dawn spent together, this time a pilgrimage to the Somme accompanied by a team-mate), in Malo-les-Bains at the end of stage 20. Less the Tour de France, more a holiday romance.

How does our narrator keep going? The Duracell batteries of his day: ether, cocaine and ephedrine. None of which he procures for himself, all of it gifted to him. Some evenings Coventry's femme fatal wreathes him in a cloud of opium smoke. Which might explain the daze he seems to drift through the race in. Though in reality that seems down to a form of PTSD, a part of the non-cycling story Coventry tries to tell about the ANZACs at war and the effects of the war on others. The PTSD makes for pleasing symmetry as the narrator takes on the memories of his brother - tries to become his brother - who served in the war a decade before and who returned broken by the memories it gifted him. Neither drugs nor PTSD, though, make for narration to engage with, not here anyway.

I found myself wandering through the novel almost in the same hallucinatory daze as its narrator, hypnotised by the flowing stream of consciousness, staccato sentences and an arresting turn of phrase, never really sure where Coventry crossed the immaterial border between truth and fiction, between the imagined real and the imagined imagined, not always sure when his narrator was dreaming, dreaming within a dream or just functioning 'normally' within the novel's dulled reality. This of course is a much favoured trope in modern cinema, done well we get Inception, done adequately we get Existenz, done poorly we get the Matrix sequels. Done dirt cheap it's a trope that affords the generous reader the lousiest of literary cop-outs: what flaws there are in the novel are in the narrator, not the writer's writing.

All of that notwithstanding, The Invisible Mile is still a thing of (imperfect) beauty: the poor plotting (the denouement fails, on multiple levels) and the simple core message needlessly cloaked in complexity are still embroidered with writing that stirred me from the slumber I too often found myself reduced to:

"I listen and understand nothing. But my ignorance is trivial and extraneous, as if the invisible thing of a child's complaint. It's the fact the words are said. It's not the words so much; it's the extraordinary fact that they are spoken at this moment, at this time, in this place alongside this carving under these windows in this light. This physical instant. Latin, Greek, French, rhythm and the stage. Here's the blood, here's the bread. I sit through the moments when the congregation are seated, I arise when they get to their feet. The choir stands and they open their mouths in harmony. Colossal, massed. They are boys singing in robes. The whole building rumbles with the sound. Nothing separates me from the voices, certainly not comprehension, that is the last thing I need to be concerned about. It is in this moment, this physical moment, that these words come the nearest they will ever be to having a relationship with the hard edge of physics. This is the effect. Germ-like, hopping from breath to mouth. All a remedy for miles, for the invisible miles and the distances we make."

As the narrator/author said so many pages before: all stories are rhythm. Here, relentlessly so.

The Invisible Mile, by David Coventry
(original Victoria University Press cover)

I suspect that, were I to know less about the Tour - were I not to be freighted down by more than six years of cycling book reviews - I might appreciate The Invisible Mile more, that were I to subscribe to the myth of epic sufferance others have shrouded the Tour in, I would appreciate The Invisible Mile more. That is either testimony to the truth of Coventry's core message - the failures of memory - or evidence of the novel's own ultimate failure.