FOR FURTHER THOUGHT & DISCUSSION: compare The Bone Cage to
Post by Arley McNeney (Thistledown Press).

Read Laura Robinson's review of the two books (written for The Globe & Mail) below or at The Globe & Mail's website here:

Sport: pool, gym, bedroom
Laura Robinson, February 2, 2008
THE BONE CAGE, By Angie Abdou
NeWest, 233 pages, $22.95
POST, By Arley McNeney
Thistledown, 469 pages, $19.95

Bodies. Strong, lean, muscular bodies, nearly all of them female. The physical, creative and intellectual meld together for authors Angie Abdou and Arley McNeney, both of them athletes, resulting in two novels, The Bone Cage and Post. These books deal with the tensioned routine of an athlete's life readying body and mind for the Olympics or Paralympics. Later, they try to get inside the athlete's head after the Games, government funding and national team jackets disappear, and life without the comfort of pool lanes or court keys looms large.

First The Bone Cage. Sadie Jorgenson wins the swim team trials for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She is a big woman, tall and with wide shoulders, chlorine-bleached hair and a body that speaks to the thousands of kilometres it has kicked and stroked since she was a little girl and realized she was meant for water, not land. Abdou takes us into Sadie's lane: "Today she feels she could swim forever, motoring full speed at the water's surface. Hot, cold, pleasure, pain. ... One thought pulses: Go, go, go. A syllable with every stroke. Her biceps and triceps, her shoulders and her back, her hamstrings and her quads - all pulse. ... Even on this good day, her muscles whisper at her: Enough. No more. She blocks these thoughts. She can die later, can rest when it's over."

Beautiful writing, this. Even on those perfect days, there is so much pain, so much lactic acid asking you to stop. The mind may be on autopilot, but still must debate the voice inside that wants to quit. The athlete must win the debate or cease being an athlete.

Finely crafted writing continues throughout, so I wondered why I felt so little camaraderie with Sadie or Digger, the wrestler who receives equal ink, or their athlete friends. I did not continue to be drawn to the pool or wrestling mat. Neither this book nor Post has much of a plot, which is fine if characters can steal us away, but I felt as if the characters in both books wore iPods and were the young people sitting beside me on the subway, existing in a world that contains no one except themselves.

What a chance Abdou had to go beyond athletic navel-gazing when she located Sadie at the University of Calgary pool and brought in Marcus, with his seventies sideburns, as her coach. In real life, as swimmers prepared for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, a dishy scandal broke involving the coach, who also happened to be the head coach of the Olympic team when he chose an under-qualified young blonde, who wore high heels and Lycra at the pool, as his assistant, and left qualified, not-so-young women coaches at home.

I wish Abdou had used this scandal as comic material, because I don't know that I even cracked a grin reading either book. Guys or gals discussing sex and trying to get laid has been done so many times that it's all very predictable, like the car accidents that happen in both books, which brings me to my next point.

While the sentences in both books are beautifully crafted, the writing feels self-conscious. I wasn't surprised that both writers are graduate students in creative writing. Somehow, the good writing didn't add up to stories that swept me into the athlete's head or body for any sustained time. I suppose you can put a dream team together, but if sentences are players, and books are games, the players have to work together to create a team that can win the game, and the game has to matter intensely to readers/fans.

What Post needed in order for this to happen was a ruthless editor; 469 pages, many of them in the gym, in cars and at drunken parties, left me just a little bored - and shocked. Narrator Nolan Taylor is on the national wheelchair basketball team. Her best friend from childhood, Sophia, comes home and meets Nolan's boyfriend, Darren, a "walking quad" from her local wheelchair team.

Sophia will not stop talking dirty to either of them when they go to dinner, as she nastily pontificates on their blossoming sex life. Darren and Nolan don't appreciate her mean microscope into their life, and Nolan pleads for her to stop. Sophia gets ruder. The next scene has Sophia sharing Nolan's apartment for a week and they are closer than ever.

Must I now declare that I have become my mother? There was no shortage of sex when I was a reasonably fast young thing on a bike, but never did I encounter a friend who felt my sex life was up for public dissection. This - for my generation, anyway - would be an unforgivable transgression of friendship and the respect friends must have for the intimacy and privacy of the sex lives of others. The friendship would have ended there and then.

So tell me I need a walker, but if it's okay for a new generation of women to have their men and the men's intimacy with them taunted by their best friends, let me know why it's okay. How have relationships between women changed to allow for callous and callow behaviour, or is there is a history between Nolan and Sophia that isn't so nice after all? Show us that history.

The same thing occurs with the relationship between Nolan and her mother. She sneered at her mom throughout the book, and then had an abrupt change in the last few pages. If the sneer is just a façade for a young woman who can't feel intimacy, then let us see the vulnerable girl underneath.

Laura Robinson was an athlete a long time ago, obviously, but still likes to ride her bike and ski. Her books Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada's National Sport and Black Tights: Women, Sport and Sexuality address sport and sexuality.