Once upon a time, football was a local affair. A club really was a club, belonging to its members, who were footballers and fans alike, all drawn from the same town, village or factory. But today nothing could be more global. A Premier League side may still bear the name of some backwater that briefly flowered in the Industrial Revolution, but it will derive its players and supporters, its owners and managers, its revenue and capital from every corner of the Earth.
This transformation is relatively recent, and literature has yet to catch up. Football narratives tend to be nostalgic and parochial: the neurotic north London of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, the class-conscious Yorkshire of David Peace’s The Damned United. English writers seem unable to escape football’s myriad outdated local mythologies, a game invented by Englishmen but whose world span now far exceeds their imaginations.
Joseph O’Neill’s transnational new novel is, I’m sure, the first to capture the contemporary reality of football as the predominant cultural pursuit of our globalised age. It could only have been written by a true cosmopolitan such as O’Neill, who is half Irish and half Turkish, fluent in three languages and raised in as many continents. Like some overpaid galáctico, he even lives in a luxury hotel. (For the record, I am in favour of novelists being able to live like footballers.)
The book chronicles the attempt by a pair of half-brothers – one American, the other Anglo-French – to track down and sign a mysterious African teen prodigy, nicknamed Godwin. Mark is the American half of this dysfunctional fraternity, a technical writer in Pittsburgh; Geoff is the European half, partly raised in Paris but living in England as a hapless agent. They are bound – only by the accident of their birth – to a self-serving, jetsetting mother who abandoned them. After a lifetime away, she plots to reunite the family and profit in the process.
It’s an amusing partnership. Mark is an intellectual: the kind of guy whose dog-training philosophy was “inspired by Benedictine monks”. Geoff, by contrast, is a coarse failed footballer who speaks Multicultural London English, somewhat inaccurately reproduced for a few easy laughs. (There’s much more to MLE than the repetition of the terms of endearment “bruv” and “fam”.) Some of the comedy strains credulity, such as when a hard-up Geoff recuperates from a leg injury by moving in with the family of a teenage prospect in Walsall he barely knows.
Things get interesting once the focus turns to Africa, presented as “a football goldmine” with “huge quantities of raw talent to be discovered”. The point is hard to miss: via its wealthy football clubs, Europe is once more embroiled in a scramble for the continent’s precious resources. (The elusive Godwin is even dubbed “the black diamond”.) This resonant insight, that football is the continuation of colonialism by other means, is at the novel’s heart, and O’Neill has cleverly dramatised it in the hunt for Godwin in the very lands once haunted by unscrupulous slavers after the same thing: black people to sell.
Unfortunately, failing to discern that this is the book’s true centre of gravity, the author has made some odd narrative choices that arguably dissipate the book’s great potential.
For one thing, in Mark, the novel has a primary narrator who is missing from the bulk of the action, and so is Geoff. It is, in fact, someone else, the French scout Lefebvre, an unsentimental old Africa hand, who ventures into the Beninese hinterland to locate the loot. The resemblance to one of those questing characters in Conrad’s colonial fictions is striking, and perhaps consciously echoed when Lefebvre admits to “a life of motion and solitude–the life of the sailor, one could say”. The roughly 50-page set piece in which we hear this charismatic, morally dubious pirate recount his treasure hunt is the book at its most engrossing. Lefebvre is crying out to have been the novel’s narrator in his own right. What exactly channelling his account through Mark adds, I’m unsure – apart from necessitating the clumsy interpolation of “Lefebvre said” every other paragraph.
As to the chapters narrated by Mark’s de facto employer, Lakesha, relating the office politics of a Pennsylvanian technical writer’s co-operative – these feel as if they belong in another novel entirely. The style here is a send-up of HR-speak, full of cringe invocations of “decision latitude”, “horizontal ethos” and “the communality of the workplace”. O’Neill exposes the pretence of corporate jargon, which simulates concern for people’s wellbeing while advancing the corporate interest. Perhaps, in this portrait of “human resources” – the extraction of financial value from human beings – there was for O’Neill a parallel with the exploits of the football industry in Africa.
The last time he wrote about sport, in the brilliant, bestselling Netherland (2008), O’Neill offered a vision of it – in that case, cricket – as an aesthetic and political ideal. I have never forgotten this line, intuiting that “what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice” – which, if you truly understand cricket’s workings, is sublimely perceptive. Godwin is pointedly devoid of such romanticism, laying bare the remorseless economic reality behind the fantasy. But that also makes the writing somewhat businesslike, effective but rarely memorable.
In the end, novels are not so different from the beautiful game. A dose of reality is all very well, but when the 90 minutes are up, we still want to have seen a goal or two, we want to have seen the words soar into the air and land in the back of the net. And in Godwin, sadly, they never really do.
• Godwin by Joseph O’Neill is published by Pantheon (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
