Wednesday 24 June 2015

The Invisible Mile - launch speech

We recently launched The Invisible Mile by David Coventry at Unity Books. Carl Shuker, who gave the launch speech has kindly allowed us to publish it below.


Carl Shuker, photo courtesy of Aaron Smale



I first encountered David Coventry five years ago – I was in London and external assessor of a project he’d been working on at Victoria that year for his MA in creative writing. When his novel arrived the package was roughly the same size and shape as a 14” cathode-ray TV. On final extraction from the courierbag the massive thing showered me like a destination wedding in the confetti from the grotesquely oversized spiral binding that was pitifully struggling to hold it together. Which is to say it was big. It was also brilliant. I wrote on it at the time: “Shipton-Pearce is a grand, colossal, twilit thing of astonishing range and scope.”
I kept in touch with him and know that David worked on this book for years. There’s a sort of trope that another David – Foster Wallace – lifted from Don Delillo in an essay called “The Nature of the Fun”: it’s about your unfinished book being a damaged infant for which you’re responsible. It’s unfinishedness and flawedness is your fault and responsibility and is directly attributable to your incompetence as a writer. The child follows you around, refusing to let you go out, sleep, eat your dinner in peace. You love it, and are devoted to it. It moans inconsolably, dribbles on your french fries, thus ensuring your undivided attention to making it whole.
It takes a lot of guts and discipline to raise a child; to write and revise just one novel. It takes a whole other order of guts and discipline, when publishers are lazy, frightened and unsure, to say, well that kid’s just going to have to go in the naughty cupboard, and I’m starting a new one. It takes more than discipline and persistence; as David writes, it takes a marvelous, transformatory kind of madness. He shelved that book to work on the book we launch today: The Invisible Mile. In 2012 David wrote to describe the new book to me: “1928 Tour de France. Lots of drugs, lots of religion. I’m thinking of introducing spacecraft and spacemen.”
The book you’re holding in your hands shows how he held true – almost – to that vision. The Tour de France in its chaotic years post-World War I: raced on cobblestones and shingle tracks, riding wooden-rimmed, fixed-gear bikes. To change gear when they hit the mountains a rider has to remove his rear wheel, flip it and refix the chain to the larger cog prepped beforehand on the other side. You’ve got two options and in the Pyrenees you know neither of them are good.
Not only did David shelve a brilliant novel, he went and wrote another brilliant novel, and this about the damn Tour de France. The Listener called The Invisible Mile: “A truly extraordinary first novel.” Stuff wrote, “brilliant … an important and impressive debut.” So much of our contemporary literature avoids the high style, and is damned with the faint praise, “quietly astonishing.” The Invisible Mile is high as a kite and loudly and profoundly astonishing. This is a book full of blood, darkness, speed, injury, insight, comedy, warmth, and bashfulness too. This is the kind of book where the narrator can say: “I find myself thinking of Harry’s wife as he writes to her of our day. Back home she is so pregnant we get shy when her name is mentioned.”
Then he can say: “I’m sweating like old dynamite.”
Here’s the NZ-Australia team sipping drinks and watching two riders from the Belgian team brawling in the street in a tiny village in the south of France:

Harry drinks the brandy and winces. He wipes at his mouth. “You know, if we were Greeks and we were back in the age.”
“They’d be starkers.”
“And we’d be doing this race starkers,” he says.
“Lord,” Percy says. “The Lord’s mercy.”
“Our bits waggling about.”
“And they’d kill us afterwards,” I say. “Lions they haven’t fed for two months.”
“That was the Romans.”
“Romans, lions. Who cares? The point is we’d be starkers.”
“And then, they’d put us in a corner and stone us,” Harry says. “They’d stand around throwing rocks.”

David’s prose is always doing this: he’s funny, he’s dry, he’s dark. But there is always a mature artist’s warmth and rhythm, and a glow of discovery. David’s narrator, and thus David, is constantly talking and thinking about awe and thus he’s able to write the aria of awe that’s fitting for a 3000-mile race to the top of the Pyrenees.

Because prose is a competitive sport, and an endurance sport too. From a writers’ perspective, the problem with a project like the Tour de France is that with this material you’ve got a long way to go and simultaneously nowhere to go. 300 pages in the present tense about a race with finite boundaries – not just a beginning and an end but a whole lot of predetermined French towns to hit along the way. You’ve got nowhere to go. Characters race, they stop, they’re tired, they talk. Nice French town looks like this. They race, they stop, they talk.
How do you approach such a task and how do you approach the Tour? The ambition simply to write an event of this gravitas is one thing. Doing justice to it is another. The pressure this externally imposed structure puts on a work of art is immense: but I think some of the answer is you have to play the changes, to show your secret list of gear inches for each stage. You have to show what you can do. With lists, memories, geography, arcs within arcs, dialogue, research, pacing, poetry, action, insight. This is the challenge and David revels in it.
The rest of the answer to how you get this book done is – and it subsumes the variations you can play and it helps nobody, really – is talent.
David writes about it too, about talent, when his unnamed narrator thinks finally, finally he’s going to win a stage. He’s going to pass the Yellow Jersey, current champion of the Tour, unbeatable freak of nature Nicolas Frantz of Luxemburg. Narrator is grunting, spitting, shouldering his way through the peloton, dying for this. Suddenly he’s neck and neck with Frantz. Beside him Frantz shouts, “Look at me. Look at my bike.” The narrator passes him. The narrator wins.
They coast together a while. Here’s David’s narrator:

Finally he dismounts and I too step from my machine and I go to him and stand beside him. We both look at his bike, it is not an Alcyon bike. It is not a man’s bike. It seems half-sized, though it’s not. It is a woman’s bike with small cogs made for the village, its handle bars a simple set for riding upright, its seat sprung for comfort and its frame angled so a lady might not undo her honour as she dismounts. A hollow there, and a hollow in my body and I know not how to fill it until I remember to breathe and what the man in Colombo had said. Breathe, be mindful of breathing.

The thing with Frantz is just talent. It doesn’t matter about the constraints. You just have to be good enough. It’s the same with prose. I’d like to proudly welcome this talent and this amazing book into Unity, and the literature. The Invisible Mile by this chap, David Coventry.

 
David Coventry signs for a full crowd at Unity Books


 The Invisible Mile is available now at all good bookshops and through our online bookstore.





Monday 8 June 2015

June newsletter



David Coventry's debut novel is set during the 1928 Tour de France. It re-imagines the tour from inside the peloton, where the test of endurance for one rider becomes a psychological journey into the chaos of WW1 a decade earlier. David spoke to us about how he came to writing the book.

"I used to be the research manager at the NZFA (now Nga Taonga: Sound and Vision) and all questions pertaining to the content and usage of the collections came through me. In late August 2012 I received an email from Phil Keoghan of The Amazing Race fame. He was asking for footage of a cyclist named Harry Watson, who I was utterly unfamiliar with. I did a bit of research to see if I might be able to help out. As soon as I saw Watson’s fairly thin Wikipedia page, that he was referred to as ‘The Priest’ during the Tour de France I just knew I was about to start my next writing project. It was the connect between history, sport and religion that immediately excited me. I heard a rhythm and a voice, went home and started writing."

David says that the link between sport and religion has always interested him.

"I adore sport and find the shape of emotions that spill out similar to what I’ve sensed in the religious activities and organisations I have spent a lot of time around during different occupations and eras of study. I’m fascinated with the compulsion of both, fascinated with the strange binding connections the dramas lend to cultures’ ideas of themselves; ideas of nationhood and individuality."
 
The Invisible Mile will be launched by novelist Carl Shuker at Unity Books on Thursday 11 June, 6pm–7.30pm.
All welcome.

Readers' Salon




The Readers' Salon with Anna Smaill and Bridget van der Zijpp on Wednesday 3 June at Vic Books was a sold out event, and huge fun. We look forward to running more of these events in the near future.


AWF15

Thanks to all our writers and the keen readers who took part in another successful Auckland Writers Festival.


We were delighted to be present when Stephanie de Montalk received the Nigel Cox Prize for her book How Does It Hurt? after her AWF event. Susanna Andrew, who organises the prize alongside Unity Books, said that in a year where there are no book awards, they couldn't let How Does It Hurt? go unnoticed.

"It is a book Nigel Cox would have been in awe of. At a talk at the 2015 Auckland Writers Festival, Stephanie de Montalk said that although she was in constant pain the mere liminal presence of books, the spines (in particular of New Zealand books) in her sightline gave her something; the presence of others, that fact of the books’ existence was a comfort. Though we’re not sure she used the word comfort. We are glad then that the second Nigel Cox Award for 2015 and $1000 worth of book vouchers from Unity Books Auckland can be given out to such a praiseworthy recipient." 


Reviews and news

Nicholas Reid finds much to praise in Steven Loveridge's Calls to Arms here.

Roger Horrocks was interviewed by Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon about his new poetry collection, Song of the Ghost in the Machine. Nice to note this collection was no. 1 on the NZ list in its release week.

"Van der Zijpp has written an adult, thought-provoking and gripping story on a real social issue." Sunday Star Times review of Bridget van der Zijpp's In the Neighbourhood of Fame.

"...her [De Montalk’s] own book deserves to be regarded as a classic on the singularly uncomfortable subject of ongoing human bodily suffering." Stephanie de Montalk's How Does It Hurt? reviewed in  Landfall Review.

"A fantastic first novel," Kerry Donovan Brown's Lamplighter reviewed in Landfall Review

Pip Adam has been building up a strong library of podcast discussions about books with other writers and readers at Better Off Read.

We are pleased to note that all Fairfax book reviews are being posted on the Stuff website now.

Report from London

Fergus Barrowman attended the Australia & New Zealand Festival of Literature this past weekend with Elizabeth Knox. He writes:

"I am grateful to Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Book Council for sending Elizabeth to London, and to the Australia and New Zealand Festival for her invitation. I have enjoyed my role as baggage handler and research assistant.

It was more like an academic conference than any festival I've been to before. You enter by an unmarked King's College door on the Strand, and look for the first of a series of green teeshirted volunteers who conduct you down corridors and up stairs to the rooms in which the events take place. Elizabeth's 2.5 hour world-building workshop was in a standard tutorial room – and because it was under-subscribed it was a great experience for everybody.

My two highlights were both in the chapel. First, a recital of settings of Denis Glover poems: Lilburn's 'Sings Harry', and new commissions from Patrick Shepherd and Lyell Cresswell, beautifully performed by Christopher Bowen and Lindy Tennent-Brown. And a poetry reading featuring Vincent O'Sullivan and three good Australians: Claire Potter, Emma Jones and Omar Musa.

Now we're in Liverpool, where people are still apologising for the weather."

Above picture: Vincent O'Sullivan reads at King's College Chapel.