{"id":848906,"date":"2026-08-09T08:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T08:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/848906\/"},"modified":"2026-08-09T08:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T08:12:10","slug":"eleven-we-burn-them-in-the-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/848906\/","title":{"rendered":"Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Max Bonnell<\/a> | 8:43am BST 09 August 2026<\/p>\n

Published: 2026
Pages: 328
Author: Ryan, Christian
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Rating: 5 stars<\/p>\n

\"\"\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a challenge faced by anyone who writes about cricket, and who cares about the writing part as much as the cricket part, which is this \u2013 how to rise above the mundane.\u00a0 There are only so many ways to say that so-and-so scored 17 at Derby.\u00a0 One way to vault that hurdle \u2013 the path taken by Gideon Haigh, say, or Malcolm Knox, before he turned to novels \u2013 is to blend together polished prose, sharp insight and a broad frame of reference.\u00a0 Christian Ryan has taken an even harder road.\u00a0 Almost nine years have passed since Ryan published his previous book, Feeling is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second, and then it became plain that he had left behind the usual formal constraints of cricket-related writing.\u00a0 Now we have Eleven We Burn Them In the Sun, which expands still further what\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n

Asked by one of the (many, many) people he interviewed what the book is about, Ryan records his own response that \u201cPeople say that this is a book about this.\u00a0 If you can already say that, there\u2019s no real point in writing it.\u201d\u00a0 It follows that Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun\u00a0is a book that defies easy summary, but here goes: it tells the stories of, or at least stories about, eleven cricketers and those stories are interwoven and interconnected in ways that you don\u2019t expect, and also it tells the stories of getting to those stories, which is done by finding and talking to the people themselves and if not the people who knew them.<\/p>\n

Maybe no one under the age of fifty remembers what a kaleidoscope is, but it\u2019s the best comparison I can think of for this book.\u00a0 It twists and turns to reveal a new, beautiful image, each one striking and distinct but also connected to the one that came before and the one that\u2019s going to follow. \u00a0There isn\u2019t, here, the standard cradle-to-grave tracing of a life, or lives; instead, Ryan takes fragments from the lives he\u2019s exploring, and connects them with other fragments until they form one pattern, then another.\u00a0 In the space of a paragraph, you can flit from a woman cricketer driving a bus in Grenada, to a jazz trombonist in the north of England to a man in Newcastle in Australia who played in a Test, once.\u00a0 Actually, two men from Newcastle who played a Test once: Johnny Watkins and Ray Robinson are two of the subjects whom cricket followers will recognise most readily. \u00a0Others include the Indian spinner Padmar Shivalkar, the Pakistani Wasim Raja, and the Lancashire wicket-keeper (and trombonist) Frank Parr \u2013 but also John Maley, the groundsman, and Janie Joseph, who played for Trinidad in the Women\u2019s World Cup in 1973 and of whom the only traces are a handful of scorecards and one striking photograph.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a consistent thread running through these stories, it\u2019s brevity \u2013 shortened careers and, in some cases, shortened lives.\u00a0 Ryan\u2019s language reflects this.\u00a0 His sentences, mostly, are truncated, superfluous words removed and the syntax often twisted, all to get faster to the point.\u00a0 There\u2019s a rhythm to Ryan\u2019s writing, or rhythms, the most frequent of which drives propulsively forward, though there are other gears, some of which are gentler and more contemplative, elegiac almost.\u00a0 It\u2019s the kind of rhythm that, as in a poem, helps to unlock meaning.<\/p>\n

Another challenge for nonfiction writers: making sense of it all.\u00a0 Readers want all those facts to be given shape and structure, to cohere, to unlock answers. \u00a0Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun\u00a0explicitly rejects this notion of a \u201cnarrative arc\u201d.\u00a0 Life, it suggests, isn\u2019t like that, and accounts of life shouldn\u2019t pretend that it is.\u00a0 So not only does the book\u2019s structure abandon linear progression, but so does its language, words arriving in an unexpected order, jolting complacent expectations.\u00a0 Don\u2019t, though, think of the book as simply a formal experiment: the depth of the research that has gone into it, years of digging and delving and interviewing, is extraordinary.\u00a0 There are few books on cricket that reveal things that aren\u2019t already known; here, you learn something new on every other page.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the book \u2013 after one reading; after the next, I suspect, something else will stand out \u2013 is the tragedy of Shirvan Pragg (or Shervan; one of many questions that don\u2019t have a clear answer).\u00a0 I remember reading in 1982 about Pragg\u2019s random, pointless death in a car accident in Trinidad.\u00a0 It was sad: he was only twenty, my age, had just come home from a successful tour of England, his possibilities exciting but untested, but I didn\u2019t think much more about it. But Ryan has found Pragg\u2019s friends, the ones who played cricket alongside him in Trinidad, the ones who were in the car with him that night.\u00a0 A story unfolds of colossal loss \u2013 not only the loss of a friend, a son, a vibrant character, but perhaps also of a loss to West Indies cricket, the loss of a cricketer of sufficient talent to demand selection in the great Test teams of the 1980s and beyond.\u00a0 And who, if so, might have altered the way the game was played in that part of the world.\u00a0 All that\u2019s speculative, yes, but tantalising nonetheless.\u00a0 Anyway, Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun\u00a0lifts Pragg (the last six words of the title are his) out of the peripheral place assigned to him by his three-line\u00a0Wisden\u00a0obituary and presents a rich portrait of a vibrant, fully realised character with much still to do.\u00a0 After more than 45 years, it\u2019s clear that his friends miss him deeply, and the book\u2019s ending, though you know it already, is terribly moving.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a book for a lazy reader: it asks for concentration and focus.\u00a0 Anyone who brings that to\u00a0Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun\u00a0will be profoundly rewarded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Max Bonnell | 8:43am BST 09 August 2026 Published: 2026Pages: 328Author: Ryan, ChristianPublisher: Atlantic BooksRating: 5 stars There\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":848907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-848906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=848906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/848907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=848906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=848906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=848906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}