Although I have never had a motorbike – I had a moped as a kid, and a couple of years ago got a scooter with the intention of taking my bike licence, but was never really interested and did 100 miles in a year – this is the second motorbike book we’ve had recently and I’ve enjoyed them both.
This book is as much a technical guide to building a café racer, combined with a social-history book of the 60s but masquerading as a love story, though, as with a fairing on a moped, the love story is bolted on for show.
The romantic plot drives the tale along and it’s fairly predictable – two blokes, both love a good-looking girl, one turns out to be a rogue despite the other looking like a rogue; girl picks the right one.
The heart of the book is one of the characters building a Triton, which apparently was a cross between a Triumph and a Norton. I didn’t know that; I did know that a café racer was a speedy bike built to race between cafés while a single song was playing on the jukebox.
The book goes into lavish detail about building this hybrid bike, with plenty of tips along the way and footnotes (Glimmerveen was a technical writer in his working life) and general advice about how to build a bike – “keep the insides as clean as a Swiss watch” is one.
The book also goes into detail about the years of the mods and rockers, especially the fashion; I suspect Glimmerveen likes his clothes and is as interested in the fashions of the era as anything else. Obviously, the mods had the best clothes, but his sympathy is with the rockers, who had the better bikes.
This does not sound promising now I’m writing it down, but it’s actually a good story, well written, and gallops along nicely. The two main characters (three if you count the girl) are all more superficial than an otherwise incidental character called Stan, who helps with the Triton. Stan is the most well-developed character, but we’ve probably all met a character like him – someone who’s a bit rough and ready but knows a lot of stuff and is kind and generous. Or possibly someone the author knew himself, so the portrayal was easier.
There are a couple of sex scenes, most unexpected. One is dealt with briefly, the other in more detail. They’re not particularly erotic – an engineer’s view of sex, where every spanner has its place – but perhaps essential to the plot. It is a love story after all.
Glimmerveen was a writer in his working life and the book flows along; the work of someone who can write. My only criticism would be the proofing (which is fiendishly hard). There are some rather ropey place names and poor old Irene gets her name mangled twice on one page.
(There’s another repeated error throughout the book which I suspect is because he wrote it on Word, but you probably won’t notice that, so it doesn’t matter.) If you like bikes, modern rockers, or enjoy stories involving bikes and modern rockers, this is well worth reading to pass an evening or two, and it’s better than “Traitors”. It’s free on Kindle.
JMC
