Photo: Chloe Knott, Danehouse/Getty ImagesChristian 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 Australian spinner who never made it beyond one Test match in the early 1970s. Then it moves to the gifted Trinidadian Shervan Pragg, killed in a road accident at 20. Woven into the accounts of lives is John Maley, the groundsman who prepared Kerry Packer’s “drop-in” pitches for the rebel World Series Cricket competition matches, played from 1977-1979. (Each pitch was prepared off-site in a greenhouse and then craned in on a concrete bed to the hollowed-out centre of the assigned oval.) There is no actual order of presentation (despite the list shown as a table of contents), for conversations are interrupted and then resumed hundreds of pages later. Or suddenly we are back with Shervan, John or “Watk” (Watkins) on a whim. As a reader you either go with the flow, or you must pay the kind of obsessively detailed and loosely rhythmic attention Ryan is paying to his movement through these lives.Others featuring in the book are Ray Robinson, an Australian batter who played in only one Test match, in 1936, in a team captained by Don Bradman; Padmakar Shivalkar, a slow left arm bowler of genius with flight who took more than 500 wickets for Mumbai between 1961 and 1988 but was never selected for a Test match; Ken Vowles, a batter who impressed in Australian national youth sides in the late 1980s but whose career never took off; Frank Parr, the mid-20th century English cricketer who preferred the life of a jazz trombonist; the Pakistani all-rounder Wasim Raja; Jack Collins, an Australian whose short career as a Test umpire was terminated in 1975 when West Indies captain Clive Lloyd complained about some of his decisions; and two women, the Trinidadian batter, Jane Joseph, whose photo is perhaps the most powerful image in the book, and Donna Carmino, another Trinidadian whose 30-minute international batting career was incredibly brief. An effortless flowThe best way to describe how the book proceeds is, I think, to quote a passage from it. Nearly a third of the way in, Ryan touches on three different Jane Josephs. One is the possibly apocryphal Janie, of Caribbean poet Joan Oanim-Addo’s book, Janie Cricketing Lady with Carnival and Hurricane Poems. Another Jane Joseph was a composer in her own right and scribe to English composer Gustave Holst. A third Jane Joseph is the cricketer whose photo and a brief match report is all we have of her. The photo catches her confident, youthful figure mid pull shot, crouched in a cat-like poise of balance, speed and power, eyes below a startlingly baroque afro following the path of the ball presumably skittling to the boundary and all this in formal whites without logo or stripes. Her shot in full flight, the twisting torso, the whites and her calm expression of purpose, all go to suggest an image of cricketing quintessence – though executed by a young Black woman independent enough of cricket’s traditions to be unafraid of sporting a seventies hairstyle statement.Ryan writes:Jane Joseph (iii) is a photo. Sinner is a tennis player destined to be one since childhood. ‘Even the way he hits the ball,’ Sinner coach Cahill once claimed, ‘it just sounds special,’ and the same is true it may be argued of Jane Joseph (iii) in the photo. Just a 1973 photo. She’s playing a pull shot, there’s a crowd of one. The disdain of her pull feels audible. Auditory, earlier that day, bowling, Jane’s figures read 10-7-7-3 in a style or category of delivery that’s unrecorded. No d.o.b. is known, or birthplace though it’s in Trinidad probably as in the photo she’s playing for Trinidad, same island, same surname as Harold Joseph who in the not far future could bowl both-ways spin using fingers or wrist without noticeable change in his action, he toured once with West Indies, to Australia in 1981-82, left out of major games but dazzling regional batters in Albany, in Mildura, the only Mildura person I know, a guy Hollier, was eight then, he remembers the town hype round the game but he didn’t go [….] You get the idea. It’s not quite stream of consciousness because Ryan is reading every cricket book ever published, discovering cricket score cards, talking to locals, exchanging obscure books with author Gideon Haigh on a street in Fitzroy, reading and investigating a Caribbean feminist poet and a composer of music that has not been written down and is no longer played. It’s complex stuff, but it’s also an effortless flow of information, voices, lives, regrets, statistics, memories, near misses, lost opportunities and tragically early death. There are no chapter breaks, and there is no clear through-line on any of the life sketches offered. At times the sentences are crisp and neat, at other times the punctuation is little more than an excuse to keep following along with a thought, an impression, a connection, an echo. In a late discussion of style in cricket, Ryan steps out beyond an author’s usual confines to comment on the style of his own project: “To write sentences with no gust of a premonition in the previous sentence about what’s coming next – how to do this in nonfiction?”, almost admitting that he is stumped by his own ambition as a writer.A national treasureTo Ryan’s amazement, Janie Cricketing Lady was never reviewed in Wisden, despite being apparently a biography in verse of a Caribbean woman cricketer’s sporting life at home and in Britain. Will Ryan’s new book be reviewed in Wisden, or is there too much that’s poetically licensed and too much about life in it, for it to be a true cricketing book?Even further on in the book, when Frank Parr’s step daughter mentions, “That was interesting what you said about how if you can sum up in a word or a sentence what a book is then it’s probably not worth writing. It’s the same with people” – the words read as a warning to reviewers and a manifesto of sorts regarding cricket and life.Perhaps too it’s an admission that this book has no way of ending because, as with science, as with philosophy, or wars, as with Frank Parr’s stepdaughter alarmingly admitting friendship with him, a “lovely, lovely man” who gave his wife black eyes, neat conclusions escape us.The book is a marvel, the mind exposed in it is a vortex of eccentric details, numbers, ideas and experiences. I hope that at some time in the future, if Christian Ryan keeps writing, he will be adopted as a national treasure.Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.