Wheel writes

It is, of course, at this time of year that people's fancies turn back to thoughts of cycling.  In my wild and car-free youth, there was never any such return, as I cycled all year round in order to get to work and (more often than not) back.  In these, my years of increased girth and diminished leisure time, however, I swap pedals for Saucony Jazz running shoes in the winter, until things get a little lighter and less frigid.  My first two velocipedal peregrinations - apart from asking very difficult questions (in Latin) of my lungs, legs and some apparently new parts of my body which have been introduced  simply to notify me that I have spent too long out of the saddle - have led me to ponder (no, that's not a Hertfordshire village) on some verbal and literary cycling associations.

In the former camp I have revisited the contrast between attitudes to the machine and the activity across opposite sides of The Channel.  Our Gallic cousins, for example, grace the device with the phrase la petite reine while, until relatively recently, riding a pushbike seriously in this country was regarded by anyone not of the fraternity as a somewhat risible activity.  Similarly, the act of rising from the saddle to exert greater pressure on the pedals starts in Calais as en danseuse and disembarks at Dover as honking (no, honestly).

The terminal point of such literary bicycle mapping is always, however, The Third Policeman by (really, you had to ask?) Flann O'Brien. One of the innumerably superior qualities of this, the finest novel that will ever be written in English (it's no use jumping up and down in that undignified manner - I refer you to page 37 of The Book Of Stuff That Just Is) is its insistence on interrogating itself as to its content. 'Is it about a bicycle' is the enquiry tumbling forth constantly from the mouth of the strange (but not Third) policeman Sergeant Pluck. In the context of the plot, it is a reasonable question, as he makes it his business, in direct contradistinction to what passes for the normal operating procedures for the constabulary, to temporarily steal and hide his constituents' bicycles, on the grounds that:

the Atomic Theory is at work in this parish

and that therefore, obviously:

iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms .

producing weird, hybrid creatures which are neither fully human nor bicycular.



So the novel is, of course, about a bicycle, or many bicycles, but also, as Puck's purloining proclivities illustrate, the insistence of human beings on expending vast amounts of energy and concern on issues and projects which are either enormously misguided or trivial.  Hence the narrator's obsession with a maverick 'scientist', de Selby, who attributes what most people call 'night' to a daily accretion of dirty air and launches an attempt to dilute water. Nesting a further example within this one, the book's descriptions of de Selby and of his commentators gradually become engulfed by their own footnotes, which grow monstrously out of proportion to overwhelm the main text.  The same determined misguidance is at work in the policemen's pedestrian handling of 'Omnium' a secret substance they have discovered which can lend more than god-like powers to its wielders, or in their case, not.


Bicycles, mad scientists, the meaning of life - why are you reading this and not rushing to your nearest 24-hour bookstore and purchasing a copy? Not to mention the delicious style, moral satire, comic dialogue, playfulness with registers and did I mention the bicycles?

On a much more trivial but nonetheless very worthy note, see The Wheels of Chance by HG Wells, which exemplifies how the bicycle helped to liberate the working classes and was a (literal) vehicle for (literal) social mobility.  Be careful, also, not to overlook Three Men on the Bummel, which is not only funnier than its aquatic partner but contains a description of inept home-made bicycle maintenance that is entirely sublime.


Or why not try these not entirely unimaginary pieces:

Pumphrey Clinker
As you Lycra it
Novel on Velo Paper


etc....

Happy pedalling.

Purr ardua ad astra

Trade was reasonably brisk at The Bookshop, Welwyn Garden, today. That ancient bookshop manager's cry, which has for countless ages rung out across the shelves in hope and apprehension: 

'Any sign of Christmas?' 

was answered with at least partial affirmation: 

'Yes, I think I saw a bit of it at lunchtime.'

Moreover, somebody bought my favourite novel, (and the best ever written, according to page 47 of the Book of Stuff that Just Is) The Third Policeman; 'Is it about a bicycle?' yes, and everything else besides.

One of the titles that has found particular favour with our customers is A Street Cat Named Bob, which seems to belong to a trend of cat and dog-based animal biographies.  I'm not going to wax cynical about this - frankly, compared to other such waves of books I've seen roll onto the shore of popularity in my various book-selling incarnations, such as Magic Eye and Irish misery memoirs, it's quite refreshing.  This phenomenon also lies behind the several recent prolonged absences of our own domestic goddess, Sally the Cat, (pictured below, impersonating books) from her hearth and home.  We discovered recently - by fortunate happenstance - that she's been meeting literary agents along our alley attempting to persuade them that her past conceals untold hardship and deprivation, and that they really ought to sign her up for a three-book deal with a 15% royalty on rrp globally. This is of course a piece of childish whimsy on my part; no publisher would actually countenance such terms.

Which brings me by a leafy, picturesque but indirect route,  containing many suitable areas for picnics, to my list of favourite literary cats.

Poetically, these have to be the enigmatic and eerie Minnaloushe, in Yeats' poem The Cat and the Moon: 

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon...





and Jeoffry in Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

It's harder to select from novels, as the genre is benignly infested with them, and they seem to be a particular favourite for the anthropomorphically-inclined scribe, so I have nominated one each from the following categories:

Most compellingly unsettling:  the god-like primal entities Mogget and Kerrigor in The Old Kingdom trilogy, by Garth Nix, which are bound into the forms of a black and a white cat;

Most silly (but enjoyably so): the cats in Felidae, a crime novel in which the victims, perpetrators and investigators are all...well...cats, albeit of the rare variety that are capable of speech and inductive reasoning and handy (pawy?) with computers;

Most romantic: a long out of print novel by the gloriously-named Dolf Wyllarde, called: Felise. A Story About a Cat By a Cat For Cats to Read, in which episodes in the titular cat's life, and especially her amorous adventures, are mirrored in those of her human companion (they both enjoy what is I believe in popular parlance termed 'a bit of rough' at one point).

I hope that among the countless works I have omitted to mention are favourites of yours about which you will evangelise in response.

Paws for thought?