The Bookworm Critique

Bit of a quandary here: the review for this book is due imminently, and I'm struggling to get to the end of it.

I thought the perfect opportunity had presented itself when I had to take an overseas flight a couple of weeks ago. Fifteen hours each way in a plane should have been ample. The only problem is, I have a strict size limit that I take into account when I am deciding on what book gets to ride in my carry-on luggage, and this was just too chunky. So Grand Prix Century was bumped in favour of something else.

This shouldn't have presented a problem. Usually I try to ride my bike to work, but a combination of the approaching Melbourne winter and a touch of general laziness has seen me recently opting for the train - a solution that gives me plenty of time to read. But again, Grand Prix Century loses out due to its girth.

It literally won't fit into the laptop bag that I lug around the place. It's a close call, and if it were even 10 pages thinner then it would probably be a different story, but as it is, it is once again left at home on the table while some other book helps to keep my temper in check when my train gets cancelled again.

This leaves just one final option: reading it in bed. That's my normal trick for books that weigh in at more than, say, 400 pages. But for reasons that soon become clear, that gets ruled out as well. I did make it to the final page eventually, but it took an Olympic-standard effort from which I may not recover for some time.

Was it worth it? Well, sort of.

Last year marked the 100th birthday of Grand Prix racing (not Formula One; that wasn't concocted until almost five decades later). Author Christopher Hilton is certainly not someone who can ever be accused of missing an opportunity to pump out a book, so it was no surprise to see this retrospective appear with his name down the spine.

Actually, that might be a little unfair of me. The first century of people and cars racing in Grands Prix is hardly a frivolous topic, and nor is it one bereft of good stories. If anything the opposite is true, and so broad is the spectrum of what Hilton is trying to cover here that I would imagine he had a harder time trying to decide what to leave out than what to put in.

How successfully he managed to pull it off depends on how you want to look at it. There are plenty of things about this book that frustrated me, but rather than get things spinning off on a negative note. I'd prefer to talk about the bits that I enjoyed first.

For all of my criticisms of Hilton - and I've had many over the years - one thing you can never call him is lazy. This is evident in the sheer number of books that he has written (even if I would personally rather that he wrote somewhat fewer, and focused his considerable energy on making each one better). But his work ethic is also apparent in the time that he puts into his research; particularly where some of his more recent books are concerned.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that trying to cram 100 years of anything into one hardback is not the work of a moment, but Hilton has done his best to tackle it head-on. Brave man. With a bibliography that stretches to four-and-a-half pages, I would hate to think of how long it took him to get his study back in order when he finally finished the manuscript.

The spin-off of this is that that fundamental integrity of the book is pretty much flawless. Given the obvious challenges of trying to fit one century of racing into just under 500 pages, Hilton has managed to include a reasonable amount of detail, and there are no significant bases that have been uncovered.

I also liked Hilton's efforts to tie the story into a wider historical context, although it would have been good to see this extended beyond WWII. Still, with so much racing to fit into a limited number of pages, something had to give.

The downsides? I'm not going to retrace my fundamental problem with Hilton's writing style, because I've written about so many times in the past. It's not personal - I have never met Hilton, but I know a number of people who are acquainted and none of them will have a bad word said about him. I have no doubt that he is an extremely nice guy, and that if we sat down and cracked open a bottle of wine together we'd probably get along fine. But there is just something about the way he writes that grates on me.

Ignoring that, my real problem with this book was its structure. Hilton has decided upon a strictly chronological framework around which to build his story, and that creates a few minefields. There is a reason why most similar books are structured thematically rather than chronologically, and that is that chronological books - especially ones covering 100 years - are agonisingly boring. But worse still, Hilton has taken the chronological thing into a whole new world by breaking things down year by year, race by race and - far, far too often - lap by lap.

Which brings me back to why I couldn't read this in bed. I tried, but every time, I found myself going through three distinct stages. First, I'd catch myself staring just slightly over the top of the book and wondering whether the cat's litter tray needed cleaning. Then, I'd realise that I had been looking at the same paragraph for 10 minutes. From there it was only a short leap to stage three, where I'd drift off altogether before invariably having the book fall forward onto my face and wake me up again.

Lap by lap, race by race accounts of any season are unspeakably tedious. And one hundred years' worth of them is one of the most powerful anaesthetics known to mankind.

My other problem was that for all of Hilton's hard work on the research front, he appears to have relied exclusively upon secondary material. Everything in the book has been pulled from someone else's book, so it follows that if you are any sort of fan of motorsport history then you are going to battle to find much information that is new to you.

OK, so the likes of Szisz and Nuvolari may not be giving interviews any more, but an awful lot of other people still are. And as well as possibly offering up some new information, some input from those who were there would also have injected some life into a book that is otherwise weighted too heavily in favour of facts and figures. At the end of the day, motor racing is an intensely human sport, and in the face of Hilton's enthusiasm for whimsy and poignancy (however slight it may be) it is ironic that he has largely left this humanity out of the book.

I don't want to make a career out of kicking mud onto books by Christoper Hilton, so I'll leave the criticism there. No author will be able to please everybody when they take on a project with a scope as broad as this, and on the whole Hilton has produced a sound account of how we got from that first race in France to where we are today.

Those with a liking for racing history might find themselves covering a lot of familiar ground (although I did like some of the eyewitness accounts from the very early years), but if you are just dipping a toe into the waters of the pre-aerodynamic era then you might find that Hilton's efforts to pull it altogether into one work offers a convenient starting point.