Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #245689 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-02
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In reviewing Matt Seaton's The Escape Artist, the irresistible temptation is to adopt the shorthand of a marketing pitch and call it the Fever Pitch of cycling. Seaton's book, like Nick Hornby's, is about male obsession and the ways it changes (or doesn't) in the face of growing responsibility and maturity. In Fever Pitch the obsession was Arsenal FC; in The Escape Artist) the obsession is cycle-racing, the sport of strange, lycra-clad lads with shaved legs and eyes permanently fixed on the back wheel of the bike ahead. Seaton is particularly good at evoking the rituals of the sport (the loving maintenance of both body and bike, the relentless monitoring of calories, pulse beats and heart rates) and at recreating the adrenaline thrills it provides. His descriptions of his own races--with the cyclists bunched together for mile after mile, each one testing and assessing the pace and stamina of the others, until the sudden, dramatic opportunity to "escape" the pack offers itself--go a long way towards explaining the otherwise inexplicable hold the sport has on its devotees. His accounts of his own developing responsibilities, and of the tragedy of his wife's illness and premature death, which force him to reassess the priorities in his life, seem more tentative. It is as if the experiences, unsurprisingly, are still too raw and painful to be approached in any less oblique and indirect way. Yet it is these passages that give the book an individuality that makes it much more than just another story of male obsession. The Escape Artist is a brief book, easily read, but it is a moving one and it manages to say much in a short space about subjects more important than cycle-racing.--Nick Rennison

Julie Myerson
'One of those rare books you'll want to keep by you and read again and again.'

Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph
His guilt, his shame, his incoherence and his helplessness as his wife dies are as poignant an elegy as anything I have ever read.

Customer Reviews

Pin sharp and full of emotion
I read this on an evening business trip to Brussels, tucked away in the dark on a seat on Eurostar. I'm glad I was there because I couldn't help welling up at one stage - a grown bloke reading a cycling book! The opening lines written about a climbing a hill on a cold morning were so aptly described I could feel the morning damp tingling my nostrils. It's no more and no less than Matt's autobiography - his life and the role that cycling plays as he gathers his thoughts and works out his emotions during high times and low. The simple eloquence is a joy though, and is exceptionally enjoyable. Up there with Tim Krabbe's "the Rider" as one of the best pieces of cycling literature ever. Highly recommended.

It's hard to put down but tinged with sadness
Road cyclists will empathise with the cycling anecdotes; Seaton is spot on with these. I think that's what I enjoyed most and particularly as some of the cycling routes he describes are familiar to me.

I've never actually read a book that I generally found more depressing than uplifting so this for me was a first (or perhaps that simply exposes a lack of extensive reading on my part). The highs and the lows are devoted equal, and indeed fleeting, amounts of time but in general you feel like you're on a gradual descent that delivers you painstakingly to the end of Seaton's cycling career. I think every road cyclist who becomes moderately serious with the sport will feel at one time or another that the rest of life (inevitably) gets in the way of an activity that takes 4 hours out of your day in activity and the rest in recovery. I felt frustrated for Seaton as he desperately tried to hang on to whatever cycling life permitted him. It's fascinating to observe how he deals with this experience and how he reconciles things eventually in his mind.

Rituals, poetry, tragedy.
A beautifully poetic description of one man's obsession with cycle-racing, the sport of strange, lycra-clad lads with shaved legs and eyes permanently fixed on the back wheel of the bike ahead. Seaton is particularly good at evoking the rituals of the sport (the loving maintenance of both body and bike, the relentless monitoring of calories, pulse beats and heart rates) and at recreating the adrenaline thrills it provides.

It is a touching tale of a life tinged with tragedy, it brought me to tears.