David Coventry always knew he wanted to be a writer - but says, like many things in his life, it took a while for him to get there.
His award-winning debut novel The Invisible Mile, published in 2015, re-imagines the grueling race undertaken by an Australasian team competing in the 1928 Tour de France.
He followed it up with Dance Prone, published last year, which explores the post-hardcore punk scene in 1980s America. David drew on his own love of music for the novel: he taught himself to play the guitar in his late teens and worked as a sound engineer before taking himself off to university at the age of 27.
Photo: Victoria University Press
He’s now finishing up his latest work which draws on his experiences of ME-Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Coventry tells Kathryn Ryan that The Invisible Mile is essentially a book about the first world war and how it’s remembered in Australia.
“I did it through the 1928 Tour de France in which a team of three Australians and a New Zealander took part as the first English-speaking team to do the tour.”
He says he stumbled across the team when he was head of research at the New Zealand Film Archive.
“I got a request for some footage of this guy Harry Watson and I did some research on him and thought, oh my god. I don’t for how long, but previously I’d been wanting to write about the first world war.”
The Film Archive had been receiving numerous requests for footage of World War I and he was concerned there was going to be a valorisation of the war.
“So, I’d been wanting to write about it, but I hadn’t any clue on how to do it. Then I came across this story and all these things lined up and I literally went home that night and started writing the book.”
Coventry says the themes of memory are vital to his first two books and he says, while writing Dance Prone, he realised there’s something violent in the act of remembering.
“When you’re recalling something, you’re changing the memory that was there previously – this is what happen in memory – so it’s a slightly violent act when you recall something. You’ve destroyed something else.
“I think, especially in Dance Prone, the violence of the music and music as a metaphor for memory. How it’s remembered, how it changes throughout, and how it’s completely forgotten.”
Coventry says he struggled immensely with ME (chronic fatigue syndrome) while he was writing Dance Prone.
“Just to be able to write a sentence was impossible. To be able to read the book, most of the time, was impossible… it was extraordinarily difficult to write.”
The ME was made worse by the fact that he also had a heart attack while writing the novel.
“For the last four years, I’ve been dealing with that.”
ME will be the subject of his next book, but he says it’s difficult to explain what that means.
“It’s not a documentary book… I guess the word is auto-fiction. It’s my life, but fictionalised and it’s trying to be literary explanation of the disease.
