Zimmer Men by Marcus Berkmann
It is 10 years since Marcus Berkmann wrote Rain Men, his hilarious account of life as a village cricketer (in both senses of the phrase)
Lawrence Booth
20-Jul-2005
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Zimmer Men bears loving testimony to a passion that refuses to fizzle out. It sells itself as an intimation of mortality (now in his mid-forties, Berkmann charts the ageing process with mock-angst), but works best as an insight into the way cricket can consume your every waking hour, until one day you stop in the middle of the pavement and realise you know your batting average to three decimal places. Berkmann reached this point long ago, and is quite happy to admit it. In fact, it is part of his identity.
The Australian Prime Minister John Howard once called himself a "cricket tragic", which presumably makes Berkmann a cricket tragi-comic. Because if his limbs are creaking more with every year, then his wit sparkles as mischievously as ever. There is an effortless ring to his prose which has never translated to his batting, but which makes the act of reading him a real pleasure.
This is a good thing, because on one level Zimmer Men has just the faintest whiff of familiarity. Some of the anecdotes might ring bells with former readers of Wisden Cricket Monthly, and you can never quite escape the feeling that, despite the book's premise, Berkmann's real motivation was simply to write about cricket again.
That, ultimately, is the point. Rain Men established Berkmann as the nation's spokesman for the obsessive but below-average cricketer and he doesn't let his kindred spirits down here. When he admits to comparing the records section from the latest Wisden to that of the previous one, the temptation is to shake your head sadly - until you remember doing it yourself once, by candlelight after everyone else had gone to bed. And in an email to Simon, a zealous convert, he writes: "Sex is over and done with in a few moments, unless you're Sting. Whereas a perfectly timed off-drive for four lives on in your mind for ever." Parts of that observation should resonate with all his readers.
Berkmann constantly invites us to laugh at him, but we can do so only in the faintly uncomfortable knowledge that we are actually laughing at ourselves. "When, and how, will you start getting worse?" he asks as you recall your latest doomed effort to time the ball through midwicket. "Will it all fall apart gradually, or very quickly indeed?" It is the question Zimmer Men deliberately avoids answering.
This is the kind of book everyone would love to write: self-indulgent yet self-deprecating, funny and, unexpectedly perhaps, touching. It is at its best as a fly on the wall of the Rain Men's dressing-room, where the humour ranges from the gallows to the sophisticated to the schoolboy, often in the same insult. Then there's Polly, his long-suffering partner. "The day you no longer care about cricket statistics is the first day of the rest of your life," she tells him. You know that deep down he agrees. It's just that he can't help himself.
