by Peter Moore

This month I met up with Matt Seaton to discuss writing books and riding bikes. You can see the full interview in the latest issue of European Vibe, which is due out any time now! In the meantime, here you can read a review of the book in question, The Escape Artist, a memoir about a passion for cycling and the loss of someone close to you.

The Escape Artist 

In The Escape Artist, the bicycle is the star. From the first page to the last, the machine is present with a silent omnipotence that propels the story forward, and pulls the reader through the pages. From the prologue, a detailed reconstruction of a weekend practice run across the Kentish downs, to the final pages which deal with an amateur race at a ‘bleak’ London racetrack, the bicycle remains the only constant in Seaton’s life, as his world revolves and changes around him.

Ostensibly, The Escape Artist is a sporting memoir. Whilst passing through the town centre today, you could find a copy of it at a bookstore nestled snugly between its supposed peers: Paul Kimmage’s Rough Ride, or Samuel Abt’s rather self explanatory, Off to the Races: 25 years of cycling journalism. Seaton’s book, however, carries a wider scope than these: during the early throws of the book he is an idealistic teenager on a subconscious search for a passion; after the discovery of the bicycle it then accompanies him to Cambridge University, then to ‘quixotic’ dalliance with the Communist Party and later, more significantly, it provides him with a constant escape from the realities of growing older and then losing his first wife, the journalist Ruth Picardie, to breast cancer.

From test run to finished product

Seaton’s style is at once both elegant and perceptive. Years working as a freelance journalist and editor have left him with a developed flair that engages the reader and his immediacy strikes an empathy with the keen cyclist. It is clear that Seaton has developed a deep and lasting emotional connection with the bicycle, which at times verges upon becoming a character in its own right; illustrated no better than when he notes how one, ‘must always obey the bike’s mechanical imperative, it’s instinctual quest for perpetual motion.’

Embroiled in the intricacies of test-runs, bicycle maintenance and the accompanying culture, Seaton is a man very much in his element. His descriptions are lucid and detailed to the extent that at one point he spends six pages describing the practical benefits of the cyclist shaving their legs. ‘It made my proud’, he writes, like claiming ‘…the badge of membership to a select fraternity.’ But whilst the cycling narrative flows fluidly, and with little hint of a pause, maddening ambiguities begin to emerge in his documentation of his life away from the bike, and in particular his evolving relationship with his wife.

What perhaps is most surprising is the fact that Seaton deals with their relationship with such little emotion and even less sentimentality. Many key scenes from their relationship gain significance in the book, simply through their omission. We learn nothing of their wedding day, Ruth’s initial misdiagnosis for breast cancer and almost nothing of her final days. Oddly, one of the more extended passages documenting their decade-long relationship is of their struggles to have children, and Seaton’s subsequent anxieties that he may have a low sperm count as a result of his spent in the saddle. In the same passage, he documents an episode during which he was charged with giving Ruth a hormone injection as part of a course of IVF therapy. As a reader, it is telling that he neglects to convey any feeling of warmth within their relationship, that he uses this particular IVF injection as a bridged introduction to the scourge of drugs in cycling. Once more, the reader can sense that Seaton is desperate to get back to more comfortable territory, but as the reader you are left clamouring for more.

Telling silence

This sense of ambiguity lingers, quite possibly because the initial scope for the book was too broad. Whereas much of the detail relating to bicycles and the surrounding culture is of interest to thousands of amateur cyclists, many other interesting areas of Seaton’s life were mentioned almost in passing, but not elaborated upon. His early life at public school, his university career, his early career working on left-wing magazines and his struggles to raise a young family alone are all areas that find their way into the book, but then only as shadows, and they are always given up at the first opportunity in favour of another section revolving around the bike.

Seaton’s general thesis is clear. He uses the bicycle to ameliorate the pressures and problems of his daily life, he is the ‘escape artist’ and as such the book is telling and personal. Perhaps we can learn as much about Seaton through his omissions, his British stubbornness to address the central issues and grab the story by the scruff of the neck, as we can from the detail that he has included. The book has its shortcomings, but, it does reach the heart of the seductive draw that attracts hundreds of thousands of cyclists to the sport. In this other world, Seaton can escape from the trudge of reality, and enter a place full of narcissism of introspection. The cyclist, Seaton writes, can become an ‘engineers of themselves… his legs smooth and gleaming.’ And when Seaton muse falls upon this other world, then that is when The Escape Artist is at its strongest. It is a memorable and vivid account that will be remembered as much for its omissions and ambiguities as its elegant descriptions of a life spent on two wheels.