Lovelock
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A classic fictionalised biography of the enigmatic Olympic athlete Jack Lovelock.
Jack Lovelock has been called the first modern athlete. He became famous internationally when he broke the world record to take the gold medal in the 1500 metres event at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. His unexpected victory against 'the greatest field of milers ever assembled' has all the hallmarks of a great discovery. A medical student, he treated his body as a human laboratory. Yet a mystery remains. In 1949 a few days before his 40th birthday, Jack Lovelock was killed when he fell beneath a train in New York.
The enigma of his death becomes the key to McNeish's quest for the 'real' Lovelock - a man who in the author's words 'covered his traces as adroitly as he ran'.
Lovelock, based on wide research but written as a fictional diary, was nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize. This edition includes the 'Berlin Diary', McNeish's journal written in Germany while researching the novel and an afterword, which contains a sobering commentary on Lovelock's death.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ``autobiographical'' novel about Jack Lovelock, New Zealand's first Olympic gold-medal winner, is almost dull until halfway through. Rhodes Scholar and Oxford medical student Lovelock (1910-1949) only becomes interesting when he visits Berlin for the 1936 Olympicsif by ``interesting'' one means less than perfect, neurotic at the least, confused about his sexual identity and, finally, awakened to politics. Lovelock retired from running almost immediately after winning the 1500-meter race against the greatest milers of his time. The remaining events of his lifeWorld War II on the home front; his long, successful wooing by an American heiress; the physical suffering caused by a riding accident (and exacerbated by his own emotional problems); his last years in America; and his mysterious death, at 39, under a New York subway trainhave none of the glamour of his golden years. But, in this novel, Lovelock becomes real, an unhappy and haunted man. Novelist (Joy, The Glass Zoo) and nonfiction (Fire Under the Ashes) author McNeish could have profitably cut much of the early part of the book, but patient readers will be rewarded by this unlikely ``sports novel.''
