The Somewhat Ambitious

Very! Or at least that’s what I said in the article I wrote for Beat Magazine last week. Actually, what do I mean ‘at least’. There’s no equivocation here: it’s shit. But that’s a fairly broad summation, so in the article I was mainly targeting the patently excessive number of books written by cricketers currently infecting my bookshop. You know something is awry when Andrew ‘Roy’ Symonds has just put out his second book. Intrigued? Then read on, dear listener… or looker.

Cricket is a fascinating beast. Although I don’t mean ‘fascinating’ to suggest that it is in any way interesting to watch. I maintain that any event that takes five days to play out and isn’t armed conflict or a Roman orgy is, by definition, boring. Or your average period. Cricket: the menstrual cycle of the international sporting world. Oh good, it’s still the first paragraph.

So yes, cricket. Terrifically boring but anthropologically fascinating. See, what really floats my boat about cricket is the mythologisation of pretty much every speck of minutiae that occurs both on and off the field. A mid-level and long forgotten cricketer like Darren “Boof” Lehmann somehow manages to hit two sixes in a row and five years later we have Richie Benaud trying to flog a $700 commemorative plate that features a moulded rendering of Darren’s smiling face with a 6 tattooed on each cheek. And the entire Indian squad scattered, defeated on the ground around him like so many Taj Hotel employees… Hmmmm.

But recently Australian cricketers appear to have become bored with mere memorabilia. Suddenly, they’ve developed literary pretensions. Now I work in a bookshop, so perhaps I feel this more keenly than your average punter, but there’s something deeply dismaying about the fact that we currently have in stock no less than five, FIVE separate books “written” by currently serving or recently departed cricketing personalities. Five. That’s pretty much half of Australia’s starting XI. Adam Gilchrist and Glenn McGrath have both released ‘auto’-biographies clocking in at 600 and 400 odd-pages respectively. Then we have Shane Warne’s treatise on his 100 favourite cricketers (300 pages), Ponting’s Captain’s Dairy 2008 (300 pages) and finally Andrew ‘Roy’ Symonds second(?!) book ‘A Year of Living Dangerously’ (200 pages).

Taken together, that’s getting close to 2000 pages worth of the written word, a monstrously large sum that in terms of sheer verbiage puts cricket’s Christmas 2008 output well ahead of such literary titans as War and Peace, The Lord of the Rings, Ulysses and Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games. Hell, it even comes within spitting distance of Proust’s seven volume epic ‘In Search of Lost Time’. Seriously, the game involves one guy trying to hit a ball with a plank of wood while other people try to catch it. For five days. An incredibly complex journey through time, space, art and memory via the prism of an ordinary man in early 20th-century France it ain’t.

Suffice to say, the best thing to be said about most of the books is that they’re geometrically sound. These books are, quite unarguably, rectangles. I also note that there’s a tendency to bulk the books out with a combination of large print, wide margins, stats tables and extensive photo sections. As an editor, I can only imagine that when Andrew ‘Roy’ Symonds bowls you an unedited, poorly punctuated 10 000 word screed on racism in cricket you start to pull out every dirty trick you have ever learnt. While your spirit crumbles inside. It may not be rich in metaphor, but goddamnit, this book WILL hit 200 pages.

But how has it gotten to this point? And who the fuck is fuelling this crick-lit economy anyway? How did Andrew ‘Red’ Symonds’ first book sell so well that they saw fit to give him a second? These questions may go unanaswered, but might I suggest that, as a short-term solution, we force the Australian cricket team to bring on board one prominent Australian literary figure for every cricketing book they see fit to publish? Gilchrist pumps out an autobiography, Tim Winton straps on the pads and keeps wicket for a couple of matches. Ponting gets a Captain’s Diary, Peter Carey gets a match in charge. Andrew ‘Roy’ Symonds gets given another book deal and the entire shortlist for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award gets a day out on the field. Sure they’re going to be shit, but this kind of one-in-one-out policy seems only fair really. Eyes on the ball Winton, eyes on the ball.

So, in short, cricket: piss off and stop tainting my bookshop. We have real literature to sell. Like the glossy, large-format Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen pseudo-biography ‘Influence’. Only $39.95 you say? And Christmas is just around the corner… I hate my job.