The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power
by Travis Culley

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Book Reviews of The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power

Book Review: Good reading but disconcerting to an upright urban cyclist
Summary: 5 Stars

To Culley conventional commuting "Cyclecraft" seems a bit sad. To him the standard conventions give advice on cycling enslaved, teaching cyclists to adapt, with skill, to the world as it is. Culley is part slave, part gladiator, promoting cycling with attitude. Part of me is impressed - though I find his writing less centred than his cycling, perhaps accessorised in ways he'd regard as anathema on a bicycle. I read this book for its intelligent thinking and to satisfy curiosity about how the city looks to a certain kind of cyclist. On both scores - though cycling with a completely different skills, mental set and physiology, I empathise with Culley's reflections. There are maxims about cities - over and underground - time, speed and space and the blight of autodependency but Cully's prose never quite justifies the rapture of some critics. That sounds churlish. To say I like this book because of its quality as a paean to cycling in the city would be to patronise someone for whom cycling - though virtuoso - is a means to ambitious artistic ends.

Cully's book reveals to the unaware - like me - that somewhere out there are the cycling equivalents of the heroes and heroines of the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". I'm not talking about the acrobats of the BMX tribe who, though brilliant, don't mix with hard-core traffic on city streets. I am intrigued that there might be men and women able to do with a bicycle what the actors are shown doing with a variety of weapons in a film that speaks over and above cult to a wider audience. That film is brilliantly directed. Its stars are fine actors and, only after that, people who fight on screen.

Culley writes but perhaps first of all he's a grand master of urban cycling. He tells us of riders who can sit on their bicycles in one spot, arms off the frame for over 10 minutes; of minimalist, practically nude, cycles; of riding in extreme weather conditions and at speeds faster than other urban city traffic, and acts of split second judgement that take on the magical quality of impossible road stunts without the protection of a steel cage or the push of an internal combustion engine.

Part of me says there's an urban cycling saga based on Cully's book waiting to be filmed - a screen success featuring in breathtaking immediacy the attitudes and skills he celebrates "The Immortal Class". The film would be rightly deplored by us civic cyclists, but when did following city ordinances make a good picture? People aren't supposed to roam the streets with the kit of a ninja warrior, but they do on film. I could see high drama and pictorial wonder in a movie featuring human powered vehicles with super-human potential doing astounding things amid trucks and cars. Cully has written the context if not the screen play. Of course it would exaggerate. Cyclists would fly. It would be as visually hyperbolic as the best cinematic car chases. It would make sustainability sexy. And because it would still look mundane without talent and charisma, they'd have to put the film-world's finest onto courier stripped bicycles and set them loose with a plot and a brilliant director trying to recover on film that old advice of the angry parent "Go play in traffic!" That might have been a better title for this book - or the film. I look to see Travis Hugh Cully in the billing.

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