Review: Bounce (Matthew Syed)

 

Full disclosure: the picture above is from MumsNet. Now I know how my dad felt when he started agreeing with Billy Bragg on Question Time.

Sharing common ground with a website for surfing mums wasn't the only eyebrow-raising moment for me when it came to Bounce. In journalist and ex-table tennis World Champion Matthew Syed's analysis of contemporary sporting culture, quotes from Dragon's Den's Duncan Bannatyne and literary novelist Howard Jacobsen  feature on the same cover.

 

What's next? I thought, thumbing through pages. Roy Keane, secret football managerial genius? Gillette are the root cause of Roger Federer's superlative tennis career? Drugs should be made legal in sport?

Actually that last one is in the book.

I read much of this with varying degrees of surprise. Syed gleefully informs his audience as early as possible - i.e. the opening chapter - that much of his world-conquering status was predicated on living in a suburb in Reading, and his efforts since that point can be traced back to that single street.

 

Success, says Syed, is predominantly based on equality of opportunity - even now something of a controversial idea, until you realise how far off many institutions are from the things he is talking about. His assertion is that simply providing the right facilities, open to all, is enough - in his case, a shed where any member of his table tennis club could practice. The rest, as Syed's life illustrates, comes down to regular practice and enjoyment of whatever it is you're doing.
 

Some of the ideas, such as the oft-quoted 10,000 hours theory (courtesy of Outliers' Malcolm Gladwell), are backed up with compelling rhetoric and excellent examples. The most successful debunking occurs with Syed analysing the young years of Wolfgang Mozart and finds that, contrary to the found opinion that he was a 'born genius', he was the product of an intensely driven father who trained the young Mozart from his baby years. As for genius, Mozart had been writing music since the age of 5, when he created Andante in C - nothing more profound than 15 solid years of practice.

 

But it's the less fashionable stuff that really creates an impression. Syed discusses at length the career of minister Norman Peale, a New Yorker who is widely credited with creating the world's first self-help book which claimed belief in almost anything can both reduce stress and improve performance.

 

One of the best, and most refreshing elements of Bounce is the author's unapologetically open outlook to all manner of ideas, even the stuff generally perceived as weird or uncool. The terms 'self help' and  'life coaches' are deservedly treated with contempt by many not due to their spiritually empty nature, but their clear lack of evidence-based reasoning, with little recognition of the historical precedents. Amongst many, the profession ranks alongside televangelism for all-out nonsense, and appears outmoded in thought.

 

And so he deserves great credit for including a man like Peale, not only for the historical precedent but for the ripple effects felt throughout professional sport today. It's fair to say Peale's theories enabled a greater scientific understanding of what affects sportsmen, and after Glenn Hoddle's dalliance with Eileen Drewery, later derided as a crackpot, it should escape no-one's attention that England manager Roy Hodgson has returned to the well (albeit for professional, rather than amateur, assistance) to employ professional sports psychologist Steve Peters for England's World Cup 2014 campaign.   

 

Arguably best of all, is the manner in which Syed makes the theory flesh in all sorts of fascinating ways. On an investigation into Kenyan genes and their effects on long distance running, the former Olympic champion is found living a humble lifestyle in a tent with his wife - quite the unconscious comment on sporting contemporaries such as Lewis Hamilton and Wayne Rooney. Such eye for detail belies his second career as a sports journalist. And in one of the book's more sombre episodes, Syed goes to visit a former East German athlete whose life changes - literally - following her indoctrination into the East German Olympic training program as a young woman.

 

He balances this genuine tragedy alongside another of his counterintuitive questions with emotional good sense and some panache - should all drugs be made safe and legal to use in athletics? The success of the chapter can be found in the sensitive way Syed handles the anonymous brutality of a Cold War state with a more contemporary flavour. Unlike many in his field, he's an excellent moralist - ironically because it forms no part of his outlook, becoming invisible in his conclusions. 

 

The foundation for this book's success can be found in one of Syed's own anecdotes, retelling his unfortunate thrashing in the first round at the 2008 Olympics. Afterwards, he's informed he focused on the event and the outcome too much. It makes no grand statements, seeks no unassailable positions; it has a frankly terrible front cover. But in focusing on the details, the conclusion takes care of itself - and that has broader repercussions for all of us.

 

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1927 - 2014 

 

During the latter stages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character returns from the dead. His reason? Loneliness. 

 

Whilst that in itself is a funny and sharply insightful remark, it almost feels like a sleight of hand trick to deceive the most intelligent of readers. Ignoring the metaphorical intent for a moment, consider: a man returns from death, and no one really bats an eyelid when he provides an explanation.

 

The novel is stuffed with clever allusions which are partly illusory in this way - how Garcia Marquez managed to build a state of normality out of the strangest happenings is the book's foundation, and was probably created from two founts - his grandmother, whose deadpan style is recounted in Saldivar Dasso's Garcia Marquez: Journey From The Seeds.

 

The second comes from history itself and there's no doubt a man of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wit noticed that the fuenta of his novel could be taken from numerous streams of life. The banana massacre, one of the very few episodes laced with anger venomous wit, actually happened in 1928 in Ciénaga, Colombia.  

 

In this novel, death, like everything else, is treated simply as an event in a circular existence, and it feels now as though, particularly with regards to mortality, Garcia Marquez was writing about the novel itself as well as the history of his country and its inhabitants. David Nicholson's 1970 review makes clear how the novel was considered to be on its uppers in the in the decade, and there's a revealing chapter in Gore Vidal's Selected Essays which reveals the newly created chasms in reading habits of east coast Americans via the NY Times bestseller list.

In short, a very rapid advancement in media, television had done for much of contemporary literature - or so it was thought. It's particularly ironic that the autocratic governments popping up all over South America contrived to produce some of the most joyous and freethinking writing seen in the 20th century, including the Kerouacs et al of the 50s.

Marquez had been at the forefront of that vanguard, working as a journalist in Barranquilla and then Caracas, Venezuela as a columnist and the principal reason for the near-airless gap between him and his characters throughout his career is surely down to these formative years. Through sheer practice, Marquez had become the writer's writer.

 

One Hundred Years is the only Nobel-winning book I've read more than once. On a sliding scale of 'chore' to 'joy to read', the latter is definitely the permanent resting place for this book. I first read the book before going to university and at the time enjoyed the stories for their ridiculous natures.

 

I read it again aged 21 after graduating and then I enjoyed the subtexts; having three years of looking at the ingredients, not the cake, had really changed my outlook to all sorts of literature, and I became a bit of a snob for it.

 

Describing my thoughts now, I still love the same things about the book but age - I'm 30 this year - has helped me marry the dual elements above through reading a larger array of books, from pop culture through to inscrutably weird. That cyclical journey, that on the face has no overtly changed from 12 years ago - is an enduring reason of my love for Marquez's finest work; because, at the end, I can relate to what he is saying, and why he is saying it.

Picture thanks to PicLab