A tale of two times

Suzanne Joinson’s debut novel takes you on a rather peculiar journey. You’re intrigued by the title even before you start reading: A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar. A cyclist’s travelogue disguised as a novel, you wonder? But there’s actually little or no biking in the story. What you embark on, instead, is a mesmerising journey that straddles timelines and cultures, and asks a great many questions.

In 1923, enthusiastic bicyclist Evangeline English accompanies her sister Lizzie and her mentor Millicent on a journey to Kashgar, a Chinese city that borders present-day Kyrgyzstan, with the express intention of setting up a Christian mission there. On the last leg of their journey, they help a young woman deliver a baby, but she dies, leaving them with an infant and murder charge on their hands. In the present day, in London, Frieda Blakeman finds herself strangely disoriented, till an illegal Yemeni immigrant and a dead woman she’s never met come into her life.

But nothing is quite as it seems. Behind Eva’s overt passion for spreading the civilising message of Christianity lies her true mission — to secretly write her book, a bicycling guide for the desert:

“It will be a new kind of book…It shall be my own personal observations, filled with insights about the Moslems. I intend to spy upon the women, fascinating in their floating garb; and the landscape, these great monotonous plains; and I shall sit upon my two wheels and feel the grit of the desert and move about the streets as if flying.” But she finds herself the caregiver of a newborn infant in a hostile landscape, though the enforced imprisonment affords her the opportunity to work on her book in secret. Three white women in a place where women are rarely seen outside, accused of a terrible crime in an antagonistic society, the incendiary nature of their evangelising mission and the threat of a cultural uprising already on the horizon — despite Joinson’s rather zephyr-like narration, the feeling of impending doom is never far.

Frieda, back home from a stressful work trip and trying desperately to keep the various ends of her life from unravelling, finds a stranger sleeping outside her front door. He’s gone the next morning, but leaves behind a beautiful drawing of a bird and a few lines of Arabic script. As she attempts to extricate herself from a damaging relationship and tries to understand why she has been named next-of-kin of a dead woman she never knew, is forced to confront her past and present in unprecedented ways.

Suzanne Joinson thus sets up a compelling double-hook that weaves through the next 300-odd pages and comes together eventually, albeit in a not-unexpected way. Eva and Frieda are two very different kinds of people; indeed, their circumstances and their worlds are different too. Yet, if there’s a thread that binds their stories together, it is a certain feeling of being adrift, of being untethered in their respective lives.

The characters are intriguing and complex, and — most notably — filled with shades of grey that make them believable and not always likeable. The zealous Millicent, convinced of her civilising mission, the hero-worshipping Lizzie, the oddly insular and yet aware Eva, the lost Frieda, the displaced Tayeb… they all swirl about in the melting pot of this intriguing tale.

The bicycling guide, as the central motif of the tale, feels a little ambiguous. The Evangeline chapters begin with little notes, purportedly from her research, but it isn’t really clear how it ties up with her intention to pen “insights about the Moslems”. On the whole, it is difficult to imagine a guide for “lady cyclists” journeying along the Silk Road to be a sellable proposition to a publisher in the 1920s and the novel does not quite convince me of it.

Joinson’s style of writing has an ethereal quality where you have the feeling of standing still, but when you look up, you find you’ve actually drifted along with the flow. No doubt, it’s a slow read, and the pace falls off towards the middle despite a rousing start. Nor is there any great twist or unimaginable revelation in the end.

Overall, don’t expect A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar to be a compulsive page-turner. But you won’t even realise it when it gets into your head and pulls you in. Suzanne Joinson is a self-confessed ‘wanderer’ and a travel and non-fiction writer, and it all shows in her work, as does the familiarity with cultures outside of her native England. The New York Times calls her writing “as deep as a mountain lake”; it is difficult to put it any better.
A Lady Cyclist’s guide to KashgarSuzanne JoinsonBloomsbury2013, pp 284399