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Bad to the Bone is a surreal comedy firmly rooted in the technicalities of one of the world's most commercialised sports: cycling.
Akil Saenz is beautiful, cinnamon gold, delicately muscled, and the greatest cyclist the world has ever seen. He is about to realise this greatness in a sixth and unprecedented win of the Tour de France when Fleischman, the doctor of a rival team, appropriates his certain victory by mysterious means. Saenz is beaten year after year by inferior riders whose inordinate physical strength is accompanied by terrible mental deterioration terminating in murders, each with its unique grotesque aesthetic. Eventually, on top of Mont Ventoux, the choice is put to Saenz. Will he submit totally to Fleischman in return for brief, climactic glory?
Akil Saenz is beautiful, cinnamon gold, delicately muscled, and the greatest cyclist the world has ever seen. He is about to realise this greatness in a sixth and unprecedented win of the Tour de France when Fleischman, the doctor of a rival team, appropriates his certain victory by mysterious means. Saenz is beaten year after year by inferior riders whose inordinate physical strength is accompanied by terrible mental deterioration terminating in murders, each with its unique grotesque aesthetic. Eventually, on top of Mont Ventoux, the choice is put to Saenz. Will he submit totally to Fleischman in return for brief, climactic glory?
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Waddington transforms his novel into a kind of Frankenstein on wheels ... an exhilarating freewheeler of a novel. --Helen Rumbelow in The Times
Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff. --Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday
Part murder-mystery, part cycling thriller, this is a great novel about the commercialisation of the modern sport of cycling. It is very funny, too: full of satirical excesses and bodily goings on. It is also good on the ethics of doping and the way in which professional cyclists are reduced, through the demands of their sport, to what Waddington calls fleshbags of blood and sinew. The usual appetites are suppressed. Everyone just works, eats and sleeps ... Legitimate, maybe, but it is close to vampirism for an honourable profession. --Jon Day's 10 Best Books About Cycling in The Guardian
Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff. --Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday
Part murder-mystery, part cycling thriller, this is a great novel about the commercialisation of the modern sport of cycling. It is very funny, too: full of satirical excesses and bodily goings on. It is also good on the ethics of doping and the way in which professional cyclists are reduced, through the demands of their sport, to what Waddington calls fleshbags of blood and sinew. The usual appetites are suppressed. Everyone just works, eats and sleeps ... Legitimate, maybe, but it is close to vampirism for an honourable profession. --Jon Day's 10 Best Books About Cycling in The Guardian
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- PublisherDedalus Ltd
- Publication date1998
- ISBN 10 1873982682
- ISBN 13 9781873982686
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages238
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