JAMES MCNEISH IN NEWS AGAIN

Last week James McNeish received publicity for his 1997 title The Mask of Sanity (David Ling) when the book, author and presiding judge were all mentioned in the retrial of David Bain for the 1994 murder of his family currently taking place in Christchurch.

This time the publicity is much more welcome as Random House will reissue on 17 April a new edition of his 1986 modern classic LOVELOCK. This new edition of Lovelock is republished together with ‘Berlin Diary’, McNeish’s journal written in Germany while researching the novel; and an afterword, which contains a sobering commentary on Lovelock’s death.

Jack Lovelock has been called the first modern athlete. He became famous internationally when he broke the world record to take the gold medal in the 1500 metres event at the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. His unexpected victory against ‘the greatest field of milers ever assembled’ has all the hallmarks of a great discovery. A medical student, he treated his body as a human laboratory. Yet a mystery remains. In 1949 a few days before his 40th birthday, Jack Lovelock was killed when he fell beneath a train in New York.

The enigma of his death becomes the key to McNeish’s quest for the ‘real’ Lovelock - a man who in the author’s words ‘covered his traces as adroitly as he ran’. Lovelock, based on wide research but written as a fictional diary, was nominated for the 1986 Booker Prize.

Lovelock’s private life was overshadowed by depression. The circumstances surrounding his death remain a mystery which continues to intrigue and puzzle the medical and athletic world.

James McNeish’s novel, now in its fifth printing, was first published in 1986. It was described by the London Times as “a marvellous crux of fiction and reality”. Its republication in 2009 marks the 60th anniversary of Lovelock’s death and, but for five days, the centenary of his birth.

LOVELOCK
Published by Random House New Zealand
17 April 2009; RRP $36.99