What I like best about an anthology is that it never nags you into reading it from cover to cover… you have the freedom to begin anywhere and hop from one section to another without nursing the guilt of having to sacrifice some sacred thread that is somehow gluing the pages together. ‘Sons of Thunder’ has writings from the fast lane, and I really like the selection by Neil Bradford.
I glanced cursorily through the contents and quickly skipped the first two hundred pages to reach to where Robert Pirsig was telling confidently that if you’re …on a cycle you’re in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely a part of it. ‘Quite right’, I agreed as I read the selected chapter where, after an initial discussion on discomfort, Pirsig got down to telling us how his bike always managed to teach him a new lesson when he thought there were none left to learn.
I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia’s moods and feelings, I couldn’t see her complaining.
(Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance – Robert Pirsig)
It didn’t take me long to finish the chapter… truth is that I had already read the book twenty years back and I’d still be having it if a friend hadn’t borrowed it and never bothered to return it. ‘Friends never return borrowed books,’ I muttered in undisguised disgust.
My wife, who was sitting in the study struggling with her Excel sheets said, ‘Don’t blame friends. Blame the habit of lending books.’ It was at this point that she noticed I was well beyond halfway through the book and she said in surprise, ‘You’ve begun reading fast… very fast. Are you reading or just skimming through?’
I smiled and said nothing as I was deciding on the next chapter that I wanted to now read. ‘Ah!’ I said, ‘this one on a bike ride from Rawalpindi to Lancashire should be interesting.’ And then, before launching myself into what Don Whillans had to offer, I told her that this was an anthology and, therefore, I had the option of reading it whichever way I wanted. And in seconds I was checking with the writer if the cholera certificate was intact, cashing cheques, and gratefully accepting half a melon to eat as I ‘bounced along the track trying to stay upright, sometimes in sand, at others in rock or gravel.’ Travel articles and stories weave a magic of their own. They take you tumbling and bouncing with them over the roughest terrains, making you see the comical side of corrupt officials, help you deal with unexpected punctures, make you fall in love with all sorts of street food, and get enamoured with the charms of even the most hard and rickety bed that you manage to sleep on after a hard day’s ride. Whillans took me through the rough and tumble of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Bulgaria… and he had such a fascinating expression for his journey that I asked my wife to read this chapter.
‘Read it and tell me what you think,’ I said. I got back the book after she had read not just that chapter but a few other stories too and she said, ‘I think we must plan a long ride travelling through countries.’ She was sold on the idea of long road travels and I said to myself, ‘Well Neil, your anthology has done what it was created to do.’
Andy Martin, another author in the anthology, writes that even though ‘Alberto and Che and a whole generation of easy riders have gone up in exhaust smoke, the mystique of the long-distance biker lives on.’ Quoting Wittgenstein, he goes on to say that ‘if you want to be a philosopher, become a mechanic. Ultimately, you have to be the bike, as if you had Castrol running through your veins.’
This anthology takes us to meet interesting people like Che Guevara and Alberto Granada, gives us comical insights into the sort of youngster that Roald Dahl was, informs us of the presence of female riders like Melissa, and surprisingly makes us dive into biking poetry by Ted Hughes too! But this is not all. You feel it is you riding ‘a dysfunctional Norton 500, ironically nicknamed ‘La Poderosa II’ (‘The mighty one’), or ‘a Velocette somewhere on the Sussex coast’, or are embracing the ‘romance of the Harley choppers with the apehanger handlebars.’
Bikes and riding them certainly take you on to a different plane where even ordinary and mundane everyday situations look at you and make you spout philosophic and psychological insights. Just read how Ted Simons was so ‘frightened of that imperious wave of the hand, of that fierce glance’ to realise that the policeman waving had just found his wallet on the road. Yet his mind went into a philosophic overdrive and he writes: ‘…here I was after all just a boy quailing before the first of authority that came my way. It went very deep in me, this fear of authority, and it sickened me to find myself as vulnerable as ever.’
This book does take you almost all over the world… different terrains, different bikes, different people, different situations, different roads – and yet, as Jonny Bealby says, every ride is ‘emotionally charged’. Jonny journeyed across Africa on a Yamaha Tenere, and gives us an interesting insight into a rider’s mind after days of struggle on shelled roads and through once picturesque villages but now bombed-out shells…
‘How are the roads from here?’ I asked wearily, once the transaction was complete. ‘I hope they’re better than these?’
They looked at me with mocking astonishment, the father placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you joking?… the roads?… better? I don’t know how long you’ve been stuck up there in the bush fella, but you’re about to re-join civilization. And, if you don’t mind me saying so,’ he turned to the others, ‘you look as though you could use some!’
In his introduction to the anthology, Neil has rightly pointed out that ‘each of the extracts within this collection communicates the emotional bond between rider and machine. The feeling of ‘oneness’ with the motorcycle is core. The rider becomes physically part of the bike rather than simply sitting astride the machine.’
No, I didn’t know all those riders who were present on the pages of this anthology. I do know, however, that I have started liking all of them… because they bare in my presence all their sordid insides and all the pleasures and happy moments equally. They tell me they’re weak and they also tell me that they have strength… a facet that their bikes somehow transferred to them. By the time I read the last of the unread passages, I knew that a long bike ride was not far away now… and the surprising thing is that the lovely Studds full-cover helmet won in a biking-blogging contest on indiblogger was delivered to me as I reached the end of this book.
Yes, life is about to erupt for me.
Sons of Thunder: A motorcycling anthology
Book details:
Title: Sons of Thunder. Writing from the fast lane: A motorcycling anthology
Author: Selected & introduced by Neil Bradford
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-780-57524-7
Price: 11.99 GBP (in 2012)
A special thanks to Rukun from Random House who sent me this book… well, Rukun, send me some more such wonderful books!
Sons of Thunder on RHI blog ‘Random Reads’
The above post is also featured on The RHI blog ‘Random Reads‘.
Arvind Passey
12 September 2012
