BOOK OF THE DAY: Bicycle DiariesBy David Byrne, Faber Faber, 297pp, £14.99
FOR DAVID Byrne, jumping on a bike is more than just about getting quickly from A to B. Aside from being a mode of transport, sitting in the saddle gives the musician and artist a platform from where he can observe the world at large.
As he cycles around various cities while on tour with his band, Byrne finds plenty to muse over and pontificate about from on top of his fold-up push-bike. It’s an idiosyncratic bunch of thoughts which come into his mind as he pedals along, from pointyheaded ruminations on the way a city’s infrastructure can affect the behaviour of its citizens to less cerebral fare such as how dogs in Brisbane have become addicted to licking cane toads.
Cycling alongside the former Talking Head would be a lot slower than a spin with another keen pop-cyclist like Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter, yet it would provide a whole lot more to chew on. You don’t hear much about the actual routes taken, though Byrne does note which cities and streets are extremely bike-unfriendly, but you’ll hear about the buildings he’s passing by, the encounters he has along the way and the exhibits in the museums and galleries he’s cycling to.
Ostensibly, Bicycle Diariesis a travelogue based on Byrne biking around Manila, Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, New York, Istanbul and a host of American cities and noting what happens on his travels.
But the real meat in this entertaining read are his thoughts and philosophies provoked by meetings with gallery owners in London to accidental encounters with teenage prostitutes in Manila.
Byrne notes early on that WG Sebald's well-regarded The Rings Of Saturnwas a benchmark for Bicycle Diaries. Sebald's 1999 book on walking the East Anglia countryside also provided a guide for how to use the bike trips to connect unrelated ideas and anecdotes.
Like the best travel writers, Byrne has an air of perpetual curiosity which comes to the fore when he arrives in a strange place and comes across new people. He’s happy to go with the flow and see where his senses might take him.
This leads to some colourful experiences. A night which begins at a belly dance party in Istanbul (“the dancers don’t have the requisite tummies for belly dancing”) sees him coming across a TV crew polling locals about a forthcoming election and ends with his thoughts on Turkey’s place in the world.
As cyclists sometimes find when they follow certain routes, Byrne ends up returning a couple of times to the same themes. He’s a passionate advocate for using bikes rather than cars in the urban environment and points out how the number of cyclists and dedicated cycle paths in New York has increased greatly.
He also details how he spent nearly a year putting together a public forum to advance cycling’s cause. “New Yorkers are at the stage where they might consider a bicycle as a valid means of transportation”, he says to explain his involvement in the project.
“If not for themselves, at least they will tolerate it as a reasonable means of transport for other New Yorkers.” The book ends with a couple of pages on how to maintain your bike alongside sketches of Byrne’s designs for potential cycle racks for New York. Such practicalities, though, are more of an after-thought than anything else. In Byrne’s world, it’s what you see and hear once you’re freewheeling down the road which is of far more value.
Jim Carroll writes about music for The Irish Times