Jones has written the definitive history of British hillclimbs, finding and filling a gap on the cycling shelf, one straining under the weight of so much dross. Publishers could use a hillclimb specialist’s touch when it comes to shedding excess baggage, rather than saturating the market with unimaginative regurgitations of stock cycling wisdom and shallow sporting retrospectives. Thankfully this book, much like the characters in it, treads a more idiosyncratic path.
It’s certainly comprehensive. As an exercise in historical research with an anthropological bent, it’s successful to the point of being almost too obsessed with minutiae. This might be a more overt criticism in other contexts, but here it matches the tone of the content. A hillclimber’s autumn is an inner litany of doubts over the smallest details, and Jones shares a carefully chosen series of anecdotes to illustrate these obsessions and the dogmatic but often fragile minds behind them. He also manages to convey the atmosphere of race day, digging deep into the handbook of hyperbolic description, but again, what could be perceived as unforgivable overstatement in another text is perfectly suited to the narrative contained herein. lofty title and all. The experience is repetitive, similar for all involved from national champion to lanterne rouge, and to keep it entertaining involves some abstraction and poetic licence, tools the writer is more than capable of using for effect.
My only criticism is more editorial than stylistic. I read this book in a day during a few sittings, and I think this highlighted certain issues that were missed, or could at least have been moderated. If I’d chosen to read this as a dip-in dip-out affair, there would have been no complaints. It’s a sprawling project, one the author has tackled with intelligence and tenancity, but as a whole it suffers from too much detail – not the minutiae mentioned before, but repetition of this minutiae. There were too many occasions where I was given a snippet of information about a particular climb or rider and thought, ‘yes, I know that already, you told me a few chapters ago; and a few before that.’ As the book so adeptly illustrates, amateur cycling is niche, and hillclimbing is nicher. It’s a blip on the sporting calendar and a stripped down affair, brief in duration, blinkered in action. I was left thinking how much a tighter edit would have helped the narrative hurtle towards the finish. The tone is rendered more meandering by this lack of ruthlessness, but perhaps that accentuates its British quirkiness. So my advice would be to take a more leisurely approach to reading it. Short steep bursts.
The writer’s covering new ground here. He’s taken a challenging subject and set the standard for all to try and beat. Anyone who tries is going to have to suffer horribly in the process. Jones’s name is on the trophy, and his record will stand for years to come. Don’t waste your cash on glossy bandwagon stuff. Buy this instead.
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