Review - 'Preferred Lies' - Andrew Greig - golf

Welcome to Reading the Game, sportswriter Jeffrey Prest's review of sporting books, both old and new.

The review of Preferred Lies follows beneath the dotted line.

In the meantime, you'll find out a bit more about me in the panel at the foot of this page.

Publishers - if you'd like me to review any of your sports titles, please click the Contact oldestmember link beneath my photo.

...................................................

Poet, novelist, mountaineer and fresh back from a near-death experience: when I opened Preferred Lies - Andrew Greig's chronicle of his search for inner meaning via 18 rounds of Scottish golf - I wasn't sure what to expect.

Recently recovered from an cranial cyst that was diagnosed in the nick of time, Greig is a man who needs no incentive to make the most of his reprieve; he is merely uncertain how to do so.

Then he decides to bring his old golf clubs down from the loft.

Rounds at Stromness and North Ronaldsay, both Orkney outposts far removed from golf's perceived elitism, rekindle his fondness for a game at which he excelled in his youth and he embarks on a 'comeback tour' of sorts; a round of 18 courses that take in the length and breadth of his native land.

The book records the cathartic nature of his odyssey - how the courses and people he encounters helps him come to terms with his past and present and re-engage with a life that has given him a second chance.

If you feel a syrupy, soft-focus, golf-meets-Barry-Mannilow tale coming on, take heart. While Greig is not without his sentimental side - he touches on the physical side of his relationship with his partner far more than is seemly for a man in his fifties - the canny Scot in him guides the tenor of the book as a whole. It is thoughtful, not mushy and the ending is not so much happy, as contented, neatly expressed in a belter of a closing line.

It is one of those strange books that I seem to enjoy more the more I think back on it, which suggests that it might reward a second reading. Greig can undoubtedly write and he paints warm, vibrant pictures of the people who accompany him on his rounds, happy for them to star as much as he does - Alastair McLeish ("...torn between notions of becoming a golf professional or a Revolutionary Marxist") Guenter Schnorr, the German high-handicapper and 83-year-old Colin Bannatyne, Greig's partner at Shiskine. To anyone who has ever enjoyed the company of an elderly stranger and then bade him farewell, knowing it is probably their only encounter, Greig's sparse prose strikes a chord:

"I dropped Colin Bannatyne off by his house and watched a very damp old man walk through the cross-wind a little wearily to his door. There he turned, raised his hand in salutation - a brief, delighted, boyish grin - then went inside.

"I never saw him again. I think of him now, as I do of Shiskine, with gratitude and pleasure."

On the other hand, I'm not quite as drawn to the hand-holding and soul-searching brigade Greig encounters when meeting the Fairway to Heaven organisation on their tour of northern courses but it does at least give rise to possibly the book's best line:

"'There's one reason I can never be a Buddhist,' I told Vin once. 'I still want to beat the s**t out of some b******s.'"

One of the great things about Preferred Lies is that its characters are as eclectic as its courses. Greig has thankfully skipped the cashmere sweater and corporate side of golf in favour of the game that's played purely for its own sake - because it's a great thing and not just the done thing.

Rounds at St Andrews, North Berwick and Dornoch are the only nods to golf's tourist trail; the rest of the book confines itself to lesser-known venues: easily done in a country where the game is part of the fabric of ordinary life to an extent you only appreciate when you go there. Whether an Engish golfer in England would have written about a similarly contarian itinerary, I have my doubts.

But then Greig is anti-establishment in many respects, although never stridently or tediously so. If you have any lingering belief in the advantages of a boarding school education, I suspect the chapter on his round at Dollar will blow them away forever. "I lost your elder brother and sister when they went to Dollar [Academy]," his mother confides in him. "I never really knew them after that."

If I have a reservation about Preferred Lies, it's that the precise nature of Greig's 'mission' is never spelt out in anything clearer than philosophical generalisations. The journey is fun but the objectives and how fully he attained them are never quite in focus.

He writes as a novelist and maybe the vagueness is deliberate but because of this, the book suffers in comparison to what I still regard as the best 'inner journey' in golfing literature - James Dodson's Final Rounds.

Dodson wrote as a journalist and, at the the risk of sounding biased, you knew from start to finish where you were in his moving account of a son taking his dying father back to the wartime golfing haunts of his military days.

Greig's book never hits the spot so emphatically, with the result that by the end of it, I'm mainly left (a) thankful at his thoughtfulness in providing a list of websites for all the courses he played and (b) curious as to how good his partner is in bed.

And I'm not sure that's quite what he had in mind.

I'm a sportswriter who has worked for publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

A sports junkie since puberty, I was mercifully 'let go' by the legal profession in 1995 to pursue a freelance writing career that had seen me cover golf and soccer for English and American titles and American sports for England's Birmingham Post newspaper.

Starting in 1996, I spent two-and-a-half years working for the press office of Britain's Budweiser Basketball League, followed by three years writing the matchday programme and club magazine for one of England's Premier League soccer clubs, Aston Villa.

Since 2001, I have worked for Emap (now Bauer), as features editor for Sea Angler magazine and latterly Trout Fisherman. You'll find my fly fishing blog at Taunted By Waters.