Product Description

Matt Seaton's critically acclaimed memoir about his obsession for cycling and how that obsession was tamed. For a time there were four bikes in Matt Seaton's life. His evenings were spent 'doing the miles' on the roads out of south London and into the hills of the North Downs and Kent Weald. Weekends were taken up with track meets, time trials and road races -- rides that took him from cold village halls at dawn and onto the empty bypasses of southern England. With its rituals, its code of honour and its comradeship, cycling became a passion that bordered on possession. It was at once a world apart, private to its initiates and, through the races he rode in Belgium, Mallorca and Ireland, a passport to an international fraternity. But then marriage, children and his wife's illness forced a reckoning with real life and, ultimately, a reappraisal of why cycling had become so compelling in the first place. Today, those bikes are scattered, sold, or gathering dust in an attic. Wry, frank and elegiac, 'The Escape Artist' is a celebration of an amateur sport and the simple beauty of cycling. It is also a story about the passage from youth to adulthood, about what it means to give up something fiercely loved in return for a kind of wisdom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16913 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 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

Review
'As poignant an elegy as I have ever read. I finished the last chapters of this book just before I went to sleep, and in the morning, with a swoop of grief in my guts, it was the first thing I thought of.' Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph 'Thoroughly tragic and almost brilliant. The Escape Artist is an achingly sad account of what Seaton now refers to as 'my former life.' Robert MacFarlane, Observer 'A heart-stopping examination of how, why and for what we push ourselves to the edge. I never thought I'd cry about bikes and cycling. It is one of those rare books you could give to absolutely anyone -- and one you'll want to keep by you and read again and again.' Julie Myerson 'This book is, above all, about passion and loss. It's about the passion of life at the very edge of athletic and mechanical achievement that is eventually lost to love of a wife and children, which in turn gives way to the loss of the wise and mother herself. I read and relished this book.' Jon Snow, Guardian

Jon Snow, Guardian
'This book is, above all, about passion and loss. I read and relished it.'

Customer Reviews

A captivating tale
The book captures the essence of the cycling experience, with wonderful descrptions of the relationships between riders. More than this, is asks some important questions about the relevance of this very consuming sport when "real life" knocks on the door and asks for a response.

I found myself unable to put the book down during the descriptions of Matt's improving results, and of his wife Ruth's
tolerance of his cycling, as they went through their trials.

The story of the pressure to give up a male obsession in order to satisfy the demands of a relationship with children were familiar territory, but left unexplored due to the tragic changes in the family's circumstances. I was left feeling quite sad and very moved by the account Matt gives.

One can't help but wonder if the cyling bug has really been extinguished in him; the passionate descriptions lead me to belive that he will find it hard to leaves cycling out of his life forever.

One for cylists and the people who tolerate them.

A must read book for any cyclist
The Escape Artist is by far the best book I’ve ever read about cycling and it tells of Matt Seaton’s life as a cyclist racing for the well known South London club VC De Londres. He used to train on the same roads that I used and it was heart warming reading in my front room in Cornwall about familiar names from my past such as Keston, Westerham, Badgers Mount and Knockholt. Places that I’ve ridden through hundreds of times on training rides. Mr Seaton was a road racer while I chose to do the less taxing discipline of Time Trialling, but I could easily identify with the obsessive nature of what being a racing cyclist is.
The book ends on a sad note with the death of his wife (the journalist Ruth Picardie) and the realisation that theirs more to life than cycling.
But after reading the 'The Escape Artist' Mr Seaton has given me an appetite to start pounding the roads again and I'll dust down my old Look Carbon Fibre racer as soon as the chiropractor's finished with me.

Strands of empathy
This book is beautifully written, and so elegantly ans subtely crafted in that it is controlled, measured, eloquent, yet unleashed on occasion when required, precisely reflecting the nature of the sport itself. For anyone that has competed in bike racing, and has given up for other reasons this is a jolting tug on your heartstrings. It's a shame that its not longer, dwelling more on those signpost life moments; but that would be to deny the impact of the book, written to be read as a race; and as such is as pertinent and as moving as any story about bike racing or indeed the vagaries and eccentricities of life itself.
If you buy no other sporting biography this year, then you should grace your bookcase and your mind with this.