The Mont Ventoux returns to the Tour de France this summer, its summit chosen to provide a spectacular finish to the traditionally festive stage on Bastille Day. Hundreds of thousands of spectators will throng the roadside of the forested section between Les Bruns and Chalet Reynard and the pitiless scree of the final six-kilometre climb to the observatory at the top, passing the memorial to Tom Simpson en route.
By including it in 2016 rather than 2017, which would be 50 years after Simpson’s death, the Tour organisers made a subtle and intelligent decision. Next year’s anniversary would offer the temptation to make too much of an event over which few can have unambiguous feelings, even as we recognise that Mister Tom was simply a victim of his era and its particular codes.
Simpson’s demise forms part of the background to an extraordinary Dutch novel, recently published in an English translation, which takes its title from the mountain. Ventoux, by Bert Wagendorp, is the story of six people – five men and one woman – who form a friendship during their schooldays in a small town outside Amsterdam in the early 1980s and in whose lives the Giant of Provence comes to play a significant role.
The title and the drawing of a racing bike on the cover persuaded me to pick it up from a bookshop table a couple of weeks ago. Flipping through its pages, I noticed some familiar cycling names – Simpson, Gerrie Knetemann, Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx – along with others from different areas of interest: Nick Drake, Charlie Parker, Roland Barthes, Petrarch, Frank Zappa. While wondering what a novelist might succeed in making from this combination, I was encouraged when I spotted a mention of Tim Krabbé’s The Rider, a novel beloved of many cycling enthusiasts. The narrator of Ventoux, a journalist named Bart Hoffman, remarks that it was through reading The Rider as a teenager that he was inspired to try to become a writer and this, 30 years later, is his effort.
From the vantage point of the present decade, the narrator looks back to the year when they celebrated the end of their studies by planning a ride up the famous mountain. Two of the boys are keen cyclists; the other three are willing to go along. The girl follows them, at the wheel of a car. All five boys – David, Peter, André, Joost and Bart – are in love with the beautiful Laura, who apportions her affection chastely. Or so it seems until things start to become complicated and tragedy strikes.
Three decades on, Laura has become a theatre director, Bart is a crime reporter, David runs a travel agency, Joost is a prize-winning physicist, André is a coke dealer and the poetry that the gifted Peter began to write in school runs through all their heads. The reunion exposes the effect of the tragedy, and the marks they left on each other.
Until I finished it, I was unaware that Wagendorp’s novel has sold 140,000 copies in the Netherlands – but I can see exactly why. His book manages to be funny, shrewd and moving, with a complex structure that never feels cumbersome, and a finale so intense that you want to read it very slowly, almost one word at a time. He captures the voices of his characters’ teenaged selves very convincingly but more impressive is the way he translates those voices into adulthood: as grownups meeting again, they slip into a version of their younger selves but textured by the successes and disappointments of their subsequent lives. The reader experiences the story at several levels simultaneously, just as the author must have intended.
People who like cycling will enjoy the references to the great Italian frame-builder Dario Pegoretti, who names his handmade bikes after tunes by jazz and rock musicians, and to the Bar de l’Observatoire, where Simpson downed a last glass of Calvados before setting off on the fatal climb and where the friends pause to pay tribute as a prelude to their own journey into the unknown.
Now a columnist for the Dutch paper Volkskrant, Wagendorp covered the Tour for several years and knows his stuff: not only the history but the emotions that embrace the recreational cyclist or amateur racer as much as the Grand Tour winner. “Nowhere is the feeling of friendship and loyalty so strong as with a group of men on bikes,” his narrator says. “You look out for one another; the strongest does the most work and keeps the others out of the wind. As you pass you touch a back, like a brief caress. You feel the concentration, the attempt to become a single cycling beast, one body, one mind.”
However, you don’t need to know Tom Simpson from Tom Dooley or a chainwheel from a jar of chamois cream, or to be yearning for the sight of the peloton in the Provençal sunshine, to gain full value from Ventoux, whose real subject is the way relationships develop over three decades between very different types of people, told in the voice of a narrator with an acute understanding of his own special role within the group of five men: “Close friendship is a rainbow … If they formed the different colours, I was the reverse prism that merged the beams of light.”
So Ventoux instantly joins my own extremely short list of outstanding literary novels in which sport plays a significant role. One is Fat City, the American writer Leonard Gardner’s marvellously atmospheric study of boxers, which first appeared in 1969, was made into an almost equally distinguished film by John Huston and is now republished in the New York Review of Books’ Classics series. The other two – Krabbé’s The Rider, of course, and HM van den Brink’s On the Water, a dreamlike evocation of the lives of two young oarsmen before and during the Nazi occupation – are, like Ventoux, by Dutch authors. If someone has an explanation for that, I’d love to hear it.
