Iced

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The love interest, Rachel is another character with no purpose other than how can she be of service to master Miles. The descriptions of the very disparate sports of tobogganing and horse racing on the flat ice, are well written and rich in small details. The story bowls along nicely and Miles eventually, of course, solves the mystery and justice is dispensed. At some point it dawned on me that the whole point of this book was for the author to go on holiday to various places of interest. That leads to Miles’ discovery that Jerry is probably fixing races and maybe was when Miles was his jockey.

He used the idea of writing a book so he could peruse all of the horse races while getting ginned up and gambling on the ponies. His father, killed in a car crash when Miles was 12, was a champion jockey and Miles had too much to live up to. All he wants Miles to do is give the horses a short run early morning and to saddle up one of the horses whilst Jerry does the other.These various pressures lead to nightmares, panic attacks, and an overuse of alcohol as an anesthetic. The trainer, Jerry Dickinson is a typical high strung asshole, who gambles and berates with frequency.

His mother will begin a struggle to pay the bills, and eventually commits suicide, for which Miles also blames himself.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

It was interesting to read about the White Turf weekend which is a high class annual major event, where race horse owners, trainers and jockeys from all over the world go. It is the first book by Felix Francis that I have read, and I will definitely be looking out for more of his books in the future. Great literature is supposed to move us, teach us about the world we live in, even if it is fiction, and this book delivers on so many levels. It toggles back and forth between the first career of main character, Miles Pussett (and what an ooky surname that is), as a steeplechase jockey and his second passion, toboggan racing. He seems to have his life together and we wonder about those intervening years between his younger life that was falling apart to this older life when he seems to have it together.

I, sadly, am not… I confess I speed read the pages crammed full of descriptions of individual British courses, and of the mechanics of individual races in which Miles rode. Later when Miles is doing a practise ride on the Cresta run someone has put something on the track, at the speed he is going Miles has no chance of stopping and ends up hitting the obstruction at high speed. I normally try and find some positives about a book, but all I can do with this one is say that it’s positively one of the saggiest, direst reads I’ve had this year. It seemed as he flew down the ice chute that he was close to a death wish, and his lack of enthusiasm for anything else was depressing. He confronts the bad guy, has worked out how he did it, and makes an elaborate plan to fix everything (they never go to lawyers or court or killing, it's always done quietly behind the scenes, "Only we have to know about this") and goes off to live happily ever after.