Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant: the Audiobook

Description

Roland Garros has never seen anything quite like him. Skegness Hospital probably hasn’t either.

In Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant: The Norman Conquests of an Ageing Tennis Player, Andy returns for the third instalment in the ageing tennis player quartet  albeit older, grander, more deluded, and more convinced than ever that destiny has placed a graphite racket in his hand.

Having already conquered Wimbledon and Melbourne – at least in his own imagination – Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch now turns his attention to the French Open. Roland Garros awaits. So does history. So does the clay. So does the small matter of reversing the Norman Conquest and proving, once and for all, that an Englishman can win in France.

But this is not a straightforward sporting quest.

While Andy imagines himself battling his way through Roland Garros against the likes of Stan Wawrinka, Pavel Kotov, Jannik Sinner, Corentin Moutet and Carlos Alcaraz, another story is unfolding in parallel. In Skegness Hospital, Phoebe – also known as Hac, his coach, ornithologist and devoted observer – keeps watch over him through a series of increasingly strange “sightings”. Evelyn Williams, who thinks of herself as Serena, writes heartfelt, increasingly anxious letters from France, still holding on to the hope that Andy might finally recognise her love.

Between them, the novel becomes a comic relay of obsession, devotion and misunderstanding. Andy is dreaming of Grand Slam glory. Phoebe is trying to keep him alive, improve his serve and possibly smuggle him to Roland Garros. Evelyn is travelling through France, sending letters and postcards filled with longing, disappointment and desperate hope. And somewhere along the way, a glider leaves Lincolnshire, crosses the Channel, and crash-lands the whole enterprise into the pages of La Voix du Nord.

Inspired by Alice Through the Looking-Glass, structured through repeated calls of “Jouez!”, and fuelled by Anglo-French rivalry, sporting fantasy and comic self-deception, Les Conquêtes Normandes is a wildly playful novel about tennis, ageing, memory, desire and the stories we invent in order to survive ourselves.

It is also a book about love in its most awkward forms: unrequited love, fanatical loyalty, misplaced devotion, impossible friendship and the deep emotional confusion of people who express care through tennis rackets, hospital visits, bird-watching notes, Toblerone, and unsolicited coaching advice.

Funny, surreal, affectionate and unexpectedly poignant, this is a novel for anyone who has ever taken sport too seriously, mistaken delusion for destiny, or believed that one more tournament might change everything.

The French Open may be played on clay. Andy’s version is played on memory, fantasy, history, longing and “la merde rouge”.