The Invisible Mile

March 20, 2017
Based on a true event, New Zealand author Coventry’s tense, dark debut novel is a powerful story of grim determination and one man’s forlorn hope to conquer fear and pain in the world’s most grueling bicycle race, the Tour de France. The unnamed narrator is an anonymous member of the 1928 Australian-New Zealand Ravat-Wonder cycling team, the first English-speaking peloton to race in the Tour de France. They are foreigners in a foreign land, facing 5,476 km of bad roads, mountains, cold, heat, illness, and injury. The narrator is 27 years old, a young man adrift amidst the ghosts of post-World War I Europe, questioning his purpose and abilities, searching but never finding any answers. Like his teammates, he is driven to compete, knowing he cannot win, just hoping to finish the race’s last invisible mile. His voice is thoughtful and introspective as he tells of his doubts and fears, forcing his mind and body to endure extreme fatigue, hunger, thirst, sickness, and injury. Celia, a race fan who follows the race in a car and befriends the cyclist, is just as adrift as he is. Best are Coventry’s vivid descriptions of cycling team tactics, the drugs and alcohol, the excitement of the watching crowds, and the bloody accidents and crashes—of the 162 cyclists that began the race, only 42 finished.

March 15, 2017
In 1928, a team of bicyclists from Australia and New Zealand were the first Anglophones to win the Tour de France.This debut novel from New Zealand author Coventry, a bestseller when published there two years ago, is the story of one of the riders on that team. But it's less a tale of sports heroics than a psychological study of one tormented sportsman. The unnamed narrator pushes himself to the physical and psychological limit during the 5,476 kilometer race. By day he pedals, survives a few crackups, narrowly misses riding off a cliff, and barely registers intense leg pains. By night he floats rather passively through a sexual affair with Celia, who appears to be a cycling groupie. The narrative is free-associative and light on dialogue and gets less linear when the protagonist indulges in drugs, including opium and cocaine. Recurring through it all are his flashbacks to two family tragedies 10 years earlier: his brother came home shell-shocked from World War I, and his beloved sister, Marya, died under mysterious circumstances. The story is ultimately less about his competition in the race than his struggles to work through the family trauma. Like the race itself, the narrative has a few dead stretches and can be a bit of a slog; even the climactic sections need to be read over a few times to be understood. Some readers may be entranced by the poetry, but others will find this a slow-moving novel about a fast-moving sport.

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April 15, 2017

This first novel tells the story of the Australian and New Zealander riders who took part in the 1928 Tour de France. One member of that team is the first-person, present-tense narrator, who also has a personal tale to tell, gradually divulged over the course of the story, about his World War I veteran brother and deceased sister. The remains of the war and memories of it hover over the story, as the riders complete superhuman rides, stoked on drugs of all sorts. The narrator is supposed to meet his long-lost cousin from England during the race, but she never shows and he instead becomes involved with a woman named Celia who is following the event, supplying drugs, and at times seems to become his cousin. The competition, which is based on actual events, takes its toll, as many drop out, some die, and those who are left carry on toward the end. VERDICT Related in a hypersensitive stream of consciousness, with fragmentary dialogs often between two people who don't speak the same language, this novel is compelling but slowly paced and oblique and may lose a few readers along its difficult course.--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

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