What an unusual, charming quasi-novel this is!

John Clarke was one of Australia's supreme satirists, and here he daringly creates an entire novel out of just two concepts: gags about tennis and jokes about great minds of the 20th century. Styled as a series of daily reports on a tennis tournament in Paris, we witness the arguments, heroics, controversies and badinage that emerge from the world's most famous personages on the court. Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Agatha Christie, Rosa Luxemberg, Albert Einstein, TS Eliot, George Orwell, Marcel Proust... the list is seemingly endless.

Clarke seems to have taken his inspiration from the kind of "university humour" found in the more intellectual magazines of his youth. If you don't have a working knowledge of the output of Tristan Tzara or Christina Stead, you may be overwhelmed. (And if you don't like tennis, prepare to be confounded!) Those who persist may still find themselves exhausted by the repetitive nature of the material; indeed, this feels like it would work well as a weekly serialisation rather than a one- or two-session read. And any reader will face the vicissitudes of their own areas of knowledge and styles of humour - the jokes range from the obvious (a crowd left waiting for Beckett on a court with a lone tree as set dressing) to the niche (Carol Reed being the 'third man' to take a set from another player). Still, who wouldn't enjoy a pensive umpire Rodin, cocksure Ayn Rand cursing at the press, Einstein questioning whether the match feels as long for him as it does for the crowd, and Proust's epic response to a simple question at the post-match conference? Clarke describes Scott Fitzgerald as a man "who looks to many Europeans to be the quintessential American, and to many Americans like something out of a play". Clarke also allows his skill for imitation to emerge from the fray, such as when he mimics the celebrated bon mots of Wilde: "A gentleman should always be serious. It amuses one's butler and fortifies the religious convictions of one's mother."

The extent of Clarke's game playing (pardon the pun) is made clear in the appendix, where he lists in detail the scores of every match in the tournament. Several hundred of them, many of which are not mentioned in the text itself. It's bewildering stuff.

At the heart of this novel, one supposes, is a question about how we as a culture value our literary, philosophical, and social minds. I'm a tennis lover myself, but Clarke rightly questions why we send rabid packs of photographers to interrogate anyone who hits a ball over a net (or successfully launches a reality television show) yet we allow the minds that have transformed our world and our culture to languish, save late-night debates in university dorm rooms and smoky coffee houses.

Something unique in the annals of Australian literature. ( )

Excellent idea and occasionally utterly inspired. ( )

Written in John Clarke's unique style, he comments on notable people in history from all fields of life as though they were participating in a tennis tournament. It pokes fun at both the people and the world of elite tennis. Very clever but unless you know the people or the tennis, it is easy to miss the significance of the commentary. ( )

Sadly, this is the first book in my LibraryThing library which I have chosen not to finish.

For years I have been a fan of John Clarke's work on television in Australia, especially the brilliant "The Games", and also his weekly political satire on ABC's "7:30 Report", so when I picked this up (thankfully for next to nothing at a school fair), I was excited by the prospect of how this peculiar tennis tournament would pan out.

Well, the answer is not as interestingly as the Australian Open which is about to finish its first week as I write this.

I'm undecided as whether 'The Tournament" is incredibly clever or incredibly twee. But I can't be bothered to finish it and find out. After reading the first 80 pages or so, in which the same sort of thing happens again and again, I decided to put it down for a couple of days. On returning to it, I decided to cheat, and skip forward to the semi-finals, but it was still the same.

The idea is this: Clarke has gathered all the giants of world culture and intellectual endeavour, and plays them off head-to-head so to speak to find a 'winner', in men's singles & doubles, women's etc you get the idea. The after-match press conferences use quotes and actions that you would expect from each character if they were in fact being interviewed after a match. Kurt Godel, for example, argues the score with Stephen Spender, requiring "verifiable proof". And so it goes. ( )

"A tournament that pits some of the greatest creative artists, thinkers, wits, polemicists and celebrities of roughly the past hundred years against each other at the notionally sporting, but sometimes bruising, art of tennis, allows Clarke marvellous latitude for his brilliant satirical wit, his love of the one-liner and his unerring nose for literary parody ... Game, set, match and championship: J. Clarke." Australian Book Review