bikes in books in brevity.

this is again a guest post by my lovely wife L. she loves books and characters. recently she has had several run-ins with characters on bicycles, so she decided she had something to say in a more pedal-centric arena.

L. runs a blog about literature and movies and occasionally music, over at Omphaloskepsis.

drop by and check her out.

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I’ve encountered a few books with bicycles as an important part of the story.

For Enola Holmes in Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes Mysteries, the bicycle is a symbol rather than a mere mode of transportation. Enola’s mother, a suffragist, makes a point to teach her daughter to ride a bicycle. The ability to ride one would enable her daughter greater freedom, and indeed, it is a bicycle that carries Enola off and away from home, away from her elder brothers’ plans to ship her off to a restrictive future.

In Leslie Connor’s middle grade fiction, Crunch, bicycles are the answer to a fuel crunch and more. The Marriss family owns a bicycle repair shop called the Bike Barn, which is housed, quite literally, in their barn. They maintain and repair bicycles on a small scale until supply and demand necessitates repairing and supplying on a larger scale, necessitating creative solutions amidst all out panic. Unfortunately, the lack of fuel strands their parents miles away up the coast and the management falls on Dewey’s 14-year-old shoulders, and that of the more gifted mechanic of the two older sons, Vince (age 13).

A message in Crunch is: besides gardening and preserving, owning a bike and educating yourself on the maintenance of it is finding increasing importance—and really, is a responsible way to live. Additionally, and to mimic the M family more thoroughly, there is value in the ability to build your own bike, at the very least own a custom made ride. Crunch offers solutions for avoiding conformity, becoming green, and building a community around the bicycle.

A favorite and recent encounter with the bicycle in a novel is Gladys in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce novels. Gladys, like Enola’s bicycle, enables Flavia to roam the countryside, which is important when there is a murder suspect to detect. The bicycle also functions as an accessible predecessor to the automobile and airplane that Flavia’s mother Harriet owned and used. Flavia is well on her way toward following in her mother’s fierce independence, a feminine and masculine figure undaunted.From the very beginning in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Delacorte Press, 2009) Flavia’s bicycle, a BSA Keep-fit that Harriet handed down, was named Gladys. In the third and recent novel of the series A Red Herring without Mustard (Delacorte Press, 2011), we learn that the bike was renamed for a new second life with Flavia.

“I grabbed my faithful old BSA Keep-fit from the greenhouse. The bicycle had one belonged to Harriet, who had called her l’Hirondelle, “the Swallow”: a word that reminded me so much of being force-fed cod-liver oil with a gag-inducing spoon that I had renamed her “Gladys.” Who for goodness’ sake, wants to ride a bicycle with a name that sounds like a sickroom nurse?

And Gladys was much more down-to-earth than l’Hirondelle: an adventurous female with Dunlop tires, three speeds, and a forgiving disposition. She never complained and she never tired, and neither, when I was in her company, did I.” (A Red Herring without Mustard, 102)

Gladys is also a friend. “I’d have taken Gladys with me, if only for company. But now, when a single one of her excited squeaks or rattles might awaken the household, I simply couldn’t risk it” (370). It’s true that the character Flavia is short on friends and faithful companions. Her father is distant, her elder sisters tormentive, and her earlier pranks with poison are underappreciated. But Gladys proves a fine companion for Flavia’s escapades.  A bicycle would.

~L

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