The cycling Dutchman

The cycling Dutchman

Tim Krabbe, author of The Vanishing, is a man of many talents - chess playing, bike riding and writing among them. By Jane Sullivan.

Tim Krabbe is a fit, healthy Dutchman of 62 with a booming voice and an unfailingly jovial manner. He stands out as a writer; he once stood out as a chess player and as a cyclist. And he stands out in my memory because he terrified me 20-odd years ago in a way I have never forgotten.

Not that he did the terrifying in person. It happened through watching a Dutch film with English subtitles, The Vanishing. Rex and his girlfriend, Saskia, are on holiday in France. They stop at a gas station. Everything is ordinary and a bit boring, as gas stations tend to be. Then Saskia vanishes.


To explain why the film is so frightening is to give away the plot, but there is no doubt that Krabbe is the man behind the terror. He wrote the original novel (The Golden Egg, later reissued as The Vanishing) and the screenplay. Reading this tight thriller today, even when you know the ending, there is still a power The Guardian described as making "panic thicken in the throat".

The Vanishing, first published in 1984, became a cult book and a cult film, and in 1993 it was remade in the US (with the same English title). Krabbe gets a little less cheerful when he recalls the "Hollywood trash" remake. "They gave it a happy ending! It's as if I wrote the story of the Titanic and they said, 'We can't use the sinking of the ship'."

But for all the bad things about Hollywood, the film did at least help to push Krabbe's writing onto the world stage. He has long been one of the Netherlands' foremost writers, but he has belatedly won much wider recognition in the past few years, when his books began to be translated into English, and into 16 other languages. He says the first English translation of The Vanishing was "horrible", but it has been done again by an award-winning translator, Sam Garrett, an American living in Amsterdam, who has become Krabbe's good friend.

Thanks to Garrett and Bloomsbury, the British publishers, fans all over the world have now discovered Krabbe's tersely elegant prose, his suspenseful plots, his overarching sense of an ominous destiny you cannot escape, his stories of doomed love, and his constant suggestion that there is much more psychological depth to his yarns than meets the eye.

He's been called "a contemporary noir master" and compared to Patricia Highsmith, but it turns out that Krabbe is not particularly a Highsmith fan: he prefers the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and the American Paul Auster.

Before Krabbe's breakthrough, virtually no Dutch writers had their work translated. Now more and more works are becoming available through a foundation, The Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, which brought Krabbe and fellow Dutch writer Tessa de Loo to Australia for Adelaide Writers' Week.

Krabbe is naturally very happy about his wider audience. "You're always a little bit jealous of an equally good American author who will immediately become world-famous and sell a million copies. We would sell maybe 100,000 copies or less and never become famous. If only the Dutch hadn't sold Manhattan to the English, Dutch would be the world language."

He's also delighted to be back in Australia, a country he has dreamed about, and the setting for three of his books. When he was a child, his father explained the world was a globe. "We were walking upright" (he holds up his finger) "and in Australia it was like this" (finger down). "So from a very early age I wanted to see this underside of the world."

HE FIRST came here more than 40 years ago at the age of 18, when he became a sailor on a Norwegian ship, and docked at Fremantle, Adelaide and Melbourne.

Much more recently, he came to Sydney, fell in love with a Ford Falcon, bought it and toured the country for two months. He drove all over, including a visit to Lake Eyre on one of the rare occasions when it was flooded.

"It was huge, but never deeper than knee-deep. There were flocks of pelicans. Every step you would break through the crust, up to your ankles, into very black mud."

In his latest novel, Delay, a Dutchman on an airline stopover in Sydney takes off on impulse to visit an old flame. In what seems a familiar Aussie tradition, she's a celebrity whose business has gone bust, and now she is on the run. The fugitives buy a Ford Falcon and drive all over Australia, including a visit to Lake Eyre, just as Krabbe saw it.

The country is described as both the ideal place to disappear into and as a threatening place that recalls the Falconio case, or the film Wolf Creek; a place where people are made to disappear.

At the centre of the story is Krabbe's recurring theme of doomed, crazy love; of lovers separated and then reunited, often in death. It takes "a little weirdness in the head" to keep writing about that, Krabbe acknowledges; but don't expect any authorial confessions. He's simply not interested in exploring any dark places in his psyche that might explain why. "When there's water flowing, I don't really need to know where the source of that water is."

In the same way, he's not interested in answering frequent questions from his fans about what his books really mean, or what their themes are. "They will probably curse me and say I'm evasive, but there's no 'theme'. I don't think about anything abstract, I'm simply creating something I like, and nothing else. I want the reader to have the idea that something very deep has been said, but not to know or care what it is."

One thing his books convey vividly is the seductive nature of evil. His villains are daring, glamorous and successful, his heroes are usually tempted to reject their timid, contemptible virtue. But again, he's not interested in explaining why. He's not as attracted to the bad guys as his heroes are; and in any case, "some of me is in the bad guys as well as the good guys".

Krabbe was brought up in "a very artistic family" where it was always clear he would not have to be what the Japanese call "a salaryman". He abandoned his university studies in psychology when it became clear to him that he was interested less in the scientific study of people and more in the way they could be used for an interesting plot.

His father and grandfather were painters, his brother is an actor and a painter, and his 18-year-old son lives in Japan and wants to be a writer. That was the age that Krabbe wrote his first novel. "It was rejected, of course." But he kept going, and his third novel was published when he was 23.

With his usual cheerfulness, he agrees he's ambitious and competitive and obsessive, "which is a trait I like in people. It narrows your view of the world, but it enables you to get a little bit further."

This approach to life has driven him more than a little bit further in three spheres: writing, chess and cycling. The writing has always been there. He just lay in bed one day at the age of 14 and realised in a matter-of-fact way that he was going to be a writer.

The chess came early. He wanted to be a grandmaster, and for a while he was one of the top 20 players in the Netherlands. Then cycling came into his life and he dropped competitive chess, though he still writes a column and runs a chess website where you can read about 110 fantastic moves.

He came to cycling in a serious way rather late at 30, but threw himself into it and for some years was one of the Netherlands' top amateur racers. His autobiographical novel, The Rider, another cult book that is often hailed as the best book ever about cycling, describes a race that is as thrilling as any of his stories. The reader is right there with Krabbe the rider, constantly checking out the opposition, suffering on the climbs and the descents, burning to win.

Does he write in the same competitive way, trying to beat other writers? It's not quite the same, he says.

"Writing is not a sport, it's an expression of the mind, of the will. Maybe you could say words are your opponents. Words are not really the perfect tool. Language sometimes falls short of what you want to do with it."

He certainly wrestles with words. Plots are easy: he can come up with one in 15 minutes, can produce up to 20 promising plots in a day. "The hard part is to believe in it deeply, to stick to it and devote all your energy to it - I have abandoned a few books." His first draft is written quickly, then he devotes a year or two to refining it. The spare style of his short books (none are longer than 50,000 words) is achieved by constant editing: "I'd rather spend a day getting a page down to half a page than writing another page."

We will soon be able to read more translations of Krabbe's work. Meanwhile, he's working on a new book, "a very sad love story about irretrievably lost young love. I come across as a very cheerful guy, I hope, but somehow my stories always take these sad turns - I can't help it".

He's also racing again. He has lost 30 kilos and is taking part in "masters' races" for cyclists over 50 and over 60. "All these guys, grandfathers, they all want to win the race, take risks, push each other, try to make each other suffer. Nothing has changed.

"You have to be a little masochistic. It's strange how immediately after suffering, climbing in hot weather, it turns into a memory of pleasure. I do like suffering in cycling, it can't be torn apart from pleasure." He smiles. "Maybe there's a connection in that respect to my books."

In The Rider, he describes how the ideal death would be to go up in a plane at 80 and jump out without a parachute. Would he really consider it? "No, 80 is too young. And I'm far too crazy about the world to ever do that. But it would be a nice death."

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