In other happy news, I see that John Lazenby's new book on the 1878 Australians is out tomorrow. I loved his effort on his grandfather JR Mason.
I picked this one up yesterday. I'm afraid that for me it was disappointing. Laze by has done a good, workmanlike job of telling the story of the tour chronologically and setting it in its historical context. If you're new to cricket history, this will be a good place to start to understand the early tours.
But there are two problems. One is that there's an insurmountable narrative problem with this story, because the climax arrives too soon. Once the Australians have beaten MCC in a single day in May, who cares how they went against 22 of Crewe in August? Lazenby does his best (as did the players!) to sustain his enthusiasm for the countless minor games, but his prose is weary by the end.
For me, though, there's a bigger problem, which is that there's nothing new here. As the extensive bibliography shows, this book is really a synthesis of books already written, bolstered by thorough mining of contemporary newspapers. No real effort has been made to delve into the (pretty extensive) archives of documents that exist in Australia (Lazenby's acknowledgements suggest that his Australian research was confined to enquiries over the phone). You know, if you go to the State Library of Victoria, you can read, hold in your hands, John Conway's pencil-written diary of the early stages of the tour. Other equally precious documents exist in other collections. If Lazenby had got his fingers dusty in the archives, there would have been more life to the book.
It's not at all a bad book. I guess I really wanted to enjoy it more.
