Christian Ryan can write. He has a gift and a passion. His gift is the way he brings a page to breathing life with his words – and his passion? Cricket.

Review: Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun – Christian Ryan (Allen & Unwin)

Certainly it is cricket, but cricket is never only cricket. Perhaps football is sometimes just football. Cricket, however, always makes more room for life than is reasonable.

Its pace, at least at test cricket level, is openly unathletic, counted out in sessions between hearty meals and nearly half the players in a match aren’t even on the field for most of the game. They watch the game they’re playing in or find ways to distract themselves while the game goes on. Not surprising that the game leaves so much room for more than sport.

And cricket is played at so many levels, in so many bits and pieces of unoccupied space around cities, in country towns, down lanes, on beaches, and in paddocks. It cascades through any society that takes it up.

The slow and the fast, the pedantic and the powerful, the inspirational and the technical, the generalist and the specialist, the stylist and the statistician, all find their grooves in the game.

The cricket Ryan has a passion for has expansive room for the magnificent failure, the obscure genius, the lost soul and the kinks of fate that can end in unspent potential.

His earlier biography of former Australian Test captain Kim Hughes, voted the best cricketing book ever in Wisden Cricket Monthly, is a compelling account of failure after failure while being an intrigued and affectionate portrait of one of Australia’s most brilliant, flawed cricketers.

Reading Ryan’s book on Hughes, it is almost as if he would have had to invent him if he didn’t exist. Ryan seems to relish writing about how close the clumsy can be to the elegant, the brainless to the brilliant – and how cricket is a near-perfect vehicle for the most human of stories.

In his new book, Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun, Ryan risks all. It might be the most unreadable cricket book ever written, or it might be the cricket book that cricket has always needed if it is to be comprehended for its mystically poetic power: its embrace of all the ways in which we can fail at life but win at being alive.

The book weaves idiosyncratically through the stories of at least 11 men and women whose lives were defined, if only briefly, by cricket. It begins with John Watkins, an........

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