THE INVISIBLE MILE

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.