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There are travel books in which a writer sets off across Europe in search of landscape, culture, revelation and possibly a tax-deductible lunch. Then there is Eleanor Bron, who appears to have looked at France and Holland and thought: yes, but what if one encountered them by bicycle, thereby adding weather, discomfort, mechanical betrayal and the possibility of falling over into the intellectual experience? Life and Other Punctures is Bron?s wonderfully sideways account of a cycling journey, but naturally it is not only about cycling. Cycling is merely the excuse. The true subject is the human condition as experienced through saddles, roads, hotels, fellow travellers, aching limbs, punctures literal and social, and the strange comedy of trying to move purposefully through a world that keeps presenting small humiliations as if they were part of the itinerary. It is a travel book, a comic memoir, a sequence of observations, and possibly a warning that bicycles, like people, are elegant in theory and awkward in use. Eleanor Bron brings to the whole thing the dry, intelligent mischief one would expect from someone who has spent years making performance look effortless while presumably knowing exactly how much effort was being concealed. She has that very English gift for sounding composed while everything around her is becoming slightly ridiculous. A road is never just a road. A hotel is never merely a hotel. A conversation with a stranger may become a miniature opera of misunderstanding. A mechanical problem may begin as an inconvenience and end as a philosophical note on mortality, rubber, and the limits of optimism. The title is doing good work. Life does indeed puncture. Tyres puncture, plans puncture, dignity punctures, assumptions puncture, and occasionally one?s patience goes off with a hiss. The sensible response is probably to repair the damage and carry on, but the literary response is to notice the absurdity of having expected smooth progress in the first place. Bron?s book sits in that pleasing tradition of comic travel writing where the destination is less important than the mind being dragged towards it at uncertain speed. There is something especially satisfying about a late-1970s paperback travel narrative: small enough to fit in a bag, old enough to have escaped the age of ?content,? and written before every journey had to be turned into ten tips, six sponsored recommendations and a tragic little photograph of coffee. Here, travel still has room to be odd. You can get lost without an app correcting you. You can be annoyed in private. You can discover things without immediately rating them out of five. This Magnum paperback is in Good condition, which seems entirely proper for a book about bicycles and punctures. A pristine copy would feel suspicious, as though it had never been rained on by implication. This one has survived, remained readable, and not collapsed into the roadside hedge of history. Crappy Old Books offers it for anyone who likes clever comic memoirs, cycling done with more wit than Lycra, and journeys where the punctures are probably the point.
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