Cadence’s chapter titles are based on musical keys; each one sets the tone for another stage in Ayres’s personal odyssey. She recounts episodes in Europe, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and China, including such incidents as being given an Iranian man’s pyjamas, playing Bach to Pakistani farmers, and knocking over a schoolboy in Neijiang. These are interspersed with reflections on the roles that music and cycling played in helping her to overcome a childhood overshadowed by the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. Her largely absent, caddish father’s gift of a ‘boy’s bike’ – a five-gear, silver Raleigh racer – against her mother’s wishes provided Ayres with a sense of autonomy and freedom from her suburban environs. But it is music that Ayres credits with keeping her sane. ‘Music saved me,’ Ayres writes. ‘Music opened a secret door to a shelter where people listened and were kind.’

Ayres undertook her cycling tour in her early thirties, thirteen years before the book’s publication. At the time she was pondering her future as a professional musician. The idea of pilgrimage, entailing personal reflection and transformation, is implicit in a long journey, especially a solo venture such as Ayres’s. Ultimately, she resolved to communicate her love of music to other people as a broadcaster.

I have never listened to Ayres’s broadcasts, but Cadence displays a phenomenal facility for articulating a musician’s understanding of music. Ayres’s commentary offers illuminating interpretations of well-known classical works and explanations of technical terms for the layperson, along with fascinating digressions on such subjects as why thirds and sixths are included in popular but not classical music, and why the saraband was banned in 1500s Spain (it was considered too erotic). Drawing on my vague memories of high-school music classes, I was able to follow the nuances of Ayres’s discussion, such as her reflections on the moods evoked by various keys. Despite the lucidity of her explanations, I wondered how someone without any kind of musical background would negotiate this terrain. However, Cadence might well prove to be an enlightening introduction to classical music if read in conjunction with the accompanying CD, which presents a compilation of some of the music that Ayres listened to on her travels.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ayres’s memoir is the role androgyny played in her cycling adventure.Historically, cross-dressing afforded a form of protection for women, particularly in male-dominated contexts, and the bicycle’s inventionsuggested a means of gender-bending liberation, with suffragettes donning bloomers to ride. Ayres, a self-described androgynous lesbian dressed in cycling shirt andknicks, was often mistaken for a man in some locations (although never by other women). For example, a Pakistani man invited her into the men’s quarters in his village. While this misconceptionprobably protected her from unwelcome advances, it also meant that Ayres was able to experience male bonding firsthand and at a depth otherwise inaccessible to her in Western countries, gaining insight into the ‘simple power of male relationships’.

As a cycling memoir, Cadence’s musical motif and skeined structure marks it from others in the genre. The obvious corollaries to Ayres’s book are those of female travel writers and touring cyclists, Dervla Murphy and Anne Mustoe. Ayres does not offer political observations about the regions she visits, such as those featured in some of Murphy’s books – A Place Apart’s (1978) investigation of factional tensions in Ulster, for example – and indeed, it is not Ayres’s intention to do so. Cadence focuses on personal interactions with local people, with Ayres’s violin often providing a point of communication in the absence of shared language, as she plays classical music – sometimes on demand – to idiosyncratic audiences along the way. Ayres only recounts one seriously threatening episode; for the most part, she found that ‘moments of kindness are SO much more common, yet they don’t stick in our minds … This whole trip proved to me that we are simply, overwhelmingly kind.’

Whether Ayres is playing Bach to a border guard to gain entry into Pakistan or teaching music in a Vietnamese Detention Centre, Cadence’s achievement is to humanise, to go beyond the stereotypes we might have of various ‘others’. Ayres’s voice is honest, congenial and wryly humorous; she manages to be reflective without being self-indulgent.There is little stasis in Cadence; the writing is outward-looking, revealing a great capacity for communicating interiority – whether in relation to music or experience – to a wide audience and a commitment at all times to forward motion.