I read about The Gift of Speed when it came out (2004, apparently), but my interest in reading it was piqued by a review of Carroll's latest, The Time We Have Taken, in an Australian Book Review a couple of issues ago. In particular, it was this passage which made me sit up and take notice:
...something else is being attempted, something rare in Australian fiction. The Time We Have Taken is breathtakingly ambitious, a Proustian narrative, allusive, reflective, elegiac and concerned very little with events as turning points in themselves. Instead, the minutiae of daily life and the unstoppable flow of time are at the novel's centre. This becomes a moving celebration of the quotidian and of the terrible beauty of the moment that we cannot see until change has rendered it past.
I've not read the more recent book, but in those lines, the reviewer, Christina Hill, captures much of the nature of The Gift of Speed. The narrative takes as its historical bookends the arrival and departure of the West Indian cricket team on its famous 1960-61 tour of Australia, and the events of tour are woven through the novel amidst several other strands, most prominently that of the sixteen year old Michael, growing up in suburban Melbourne and furiously practising his bowling with the aspiration of reaching a perfect moment, a moment of grace. The short chapters are told from several alternating points of view (one - and only one, I think - is told from two), present tense third person except those of Michael's aging grandmother, which are presented in the first person; the style is quite lyrical and very Australian.
I must admit, I admired this novel - liked it, even - more than I enjoyed it. About a quarter of the way in, I distinctly heard in my mind, in tones of woe, the words "oh no, it's a coming of age novel!", and while that didn't turn out to be entirely accurate (and even to the extent that it is accurate, that aspect of the novel is well done - the relationship between Michael and Kathleen Marsden, for example, is sensitively and precisely portrayed), there's enough of that here to put me on my guard. More tellingly, there isn't much of a story to it - which is hardly a criticism (and perhaps especially when that doesn't seem to be what the author set out to do in the first place), but makes it that much more unlikely that I'll really get into a book, and while The Gift of Speed has a lot going for it, it doesn't have the extra kick that a To The Lighthouse, say, or an Invisible Cities has, to really push me past the lack of story and bring me to love it anyway. So, overall response definitely positive, and it's grand to read a good novel set in Melbourne (even if near half a century ago), but it hasn't inspired me.
