Two cyclists, teammates in the Tour de France, are milling about near the starting line of the day’s stage. They fidget as they count down the minutes to the starter’s horn, to the backbreaking uphill slogs and breathless downhill sprints that will make up the next 100-mile ride. One tells a joke:
Joe Mungo Reed’s remarkable debut novel We Begin Our Ascent is a rare story about these others. Our protagonist, Sol, is a domestique, a cyclist whose goal is not to win the Tour, but to maximize his team leader’s chances of winning—pacing him early, shielding him from the wind, frustrating other riders’ attempts to pass him. A lifetime of unceasing toil has brought him this far, to a spot in cycling’s most prestigious event, but Sol lacks the mental and physical gear that distinguishes the true greats—he will never become an endorsement magnet, a media darling, a star. He suspects that, professionally, he has more or less peaked.
This bothers him less than you might think. His aims are more existential. He races not to transcend his limits, but to meet them exactly: to wring every last drop of production from his own body. He pursues “not the podiums or flowers or paychecks (or not only them), but the feeling of justified exhaustion, the satisfaction of having done what was asked of me.” He lusts after the stickers his ferociously exacting coach Rafael dispenses to riders after an exceptional day’s performance.
By forgoing the tropes of sports fiction, which tends to rely heavily on narratives of the sorts that fans experience—the rise to stardom, the titanic rivalries, the winner-take-all championship climaxes—Reed is free to examine a more quietly human theme: the beauty and absurdity of lives characterized by fanatical striving after incredibly specific goals to the exclusion of nearly all else. Sol senses that this striving somehow diminishes him, that he and his teammates are “unique not in capabilities we had gained but in those we had chosen to jettison.” A world-class athlete, he is not even traditionally fit: “We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.” And yet the reader senses a quiet majesty in the simplicity of what his wife Liz, a geneticist and an ambitious striver of her own, calls the “sense of the story you tell yourself.”
Unfortunately, things aren’t quite so simple when Sol gets off his bike. With the Tour fully underway, Sol’s bovine devotion to Rafael’s coaching reels both him and his wife into another operation concerned with pushing the limits of human potential: a ring smuggling performance-enhancing drugs for the team. Eventually, it is the tension between Sol’s Zen-like conception of cycling and the no-holds-barred competitive edge he and his team chase—not the Tour itself—that drives the central plot of the book.
There is much more here: meditations on love, marriage, and childbirth, on science and human flourishing, on man’s fallibility and mortality—and on what remains when a life’s goal is lost or forgotten. Small, gorgeous vignettes whir by as quickly and unobtrusively as the scenery along the bike path. All is kept humming along at a sprightly pace by Reed’s muscular, spare prose. At 244 pages, We Begin Our Ascent is read in a bound. Set aside a weekend and tackle it twice.
