Fun and games – literally – in this week’s reading: Rob Steen’s THE MAVERICKS: ENGLISH FOOTBALL WHEN FLAIR WORE FLARES celebrates those footballers who followed the trail blazed by George Best – the likes of Charlie George, Tony Currie, Peter Osgood, Stan Bowles, Rodney Marsh (the last examples glimpsed in English football were Paul Gascoigne and Southampton’s ‘God’, Matt Le Tissier) – who wore the Number 10 and played the game for the sheer joy of it all (or, in one case, because it was easier than actual work when it came to the vexed issue of financing a gambling habit). Ignored and / or distrusted at international level at a time when England were serially failing to qualify for the World Cup, the Mavericks, according to Rob Steen, were the platonic ideal of footballing excellence, entertainers above all else, men who raised the game to the level of art. And so forth. It’s a bitter-sweet read, given that Steen interviews most of the Mavericks in the wake of their (for the most part) underachieving careers, but for anyone with an interest in the beautiful game, it’s a delicious read.
At one point Steen quotes Matt Busby on the direction the game is taking, at a time when George Best was being kicked out of the game by the likes of Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris: “Because of their heart and skill, he and other outstanding players in the league can go on giving the crowds entertainment. And it’s true there are still a few teams who believe the game is about talent and technique and imagination, but for any one you’ll find ten who rely on runners and hard men.”
For some reason, this got me thinking about the crime novel, and how in recent years particularly the genre seems to have become increasingly pro forma. Maybe you couldn’t build a successful football team full of ‘mavericks’, and you certainly couldn’t build a publishing industry on their literary equivalent, but surely there should be enough room for a lot more writers like (say) Hesh Kestin and James Crumley, Barry Gifford and Jon Steele. Or maybe not – maybe it’s the case that what’s rare is wonderful.
Anyway, the sporting theme continued with Philip Roth’s THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL – I’m not a Philip Roth fan per se, but I’m a sucker for a good baseball novel (THE NATURAL, SHOELESS JOE, THE ART OF FIELDING). Not that a baseball novel is necessarily ‘about’ baseball; but, apart from the gunslinger narrative of the pitcher facing down the batter that lies at the heart of a good baseball story, there’s something about the language of baseball (short stop, pop fly, swing away, shagging flies, suicide squeeze, et al) I love. Roth’s comic tale about the fictional Ruppert Mundys should have nailed me to the floor, but the humour is too arch, the tale too baroque – the novel isn’t just a parody of the great American novel, it’s a spoof of the baseball novel too. Maybe it’s that, at this remove on this side of the pond, I’m a little bit too in love with the myth of baseball, and take the myth-making element a bit too seriously, while Roth was having fun in demythologising the game as America’s conduit to a supposedly innocent past. Either way, it didn’t really work for me.
On the music front, a recommendation this week for Trio Mediaeval’s Aquilonis sent me off listening to Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Rós, because that’s the way my brain works. I only stumbled across Sigur Rós last year, and Ágætis byrjun was the first of their albums I listened to (I went out and bought another four), but so far it’s still the only one I’ve listened to, because I’m terrified the others won’t be as good. Sigur Rós are Icelandic, and if you had to pigeonhole them you’d say they’re post-rock, but they’re beautifully opaque as they go about constructing their classically-inspired ethereal soundscapes – yep, we’re into the realms of sonic cathedrals and suchlike. I’ve never been to Iceland, but if living there felt half as good as Ágætis byrjun sounds, I’d move there tomorrow – if Sibelius was still composing, he’d probably sound a lot like this: Movies-wise, I had the dubious pleasure this week of watching Escape to Athena late one night, a potboiler set on an unnamed Greek island during WWII, in which a motley crew work their way through a bonkers plot. I don’t know if I’d ever recommend it to anyone (to be honest, I was mainly watching it for the scenery; it was shot on Rhodes), but if kitsch is your thing, then it does at least boast what is very likely the most 1970s cast ever: Roger Moore, David Niven, Claudia Cardinale, Telly Savalas, Richard Roundtree, Sonny Bono, Stephanie Powers and Elliott Gould.
As for this week’s releases, my film of the week is Our Kind of Traitor, adapted from the John Le Carré novel and directed by Susanna White. My review in the Irish Examiner runs a lot like this:
The post-Cold War landscape in international espionage has made for some surprising bedfellows, a fact to which the title of Our Kind of Traitor (15A) alludes. Perry Makepeace (Ewan McGregor) is a professor of poetics holidaying in Morocco with his wife Gail (Naomie Harris) when they are approached by a Russian, Dima (Stellan Skarsgård). A money launderer for the Russian mafia, Dima fears for the lives of his wife and children as a result of a mafia turf war being fought out in Moscow. Can Perry act as Dima’s go-between with British Intelligence back in London, and secure the safety of Dima’s family in return for information about corruption that goes to the very heart of the British political establishment? Adapted from John Le Carré’s novel by Hossein Amini and directed by Susanna White, Our Kind of Traitor is a bracingly cynical thriller that revels in its realpolitik – Hector (Damian Lewis), the handler who takes on Dima’s case, is as impersonal as a chess master as he shuffles his pawns around the board. Where the recent TV adaptation of Le Carré’s The Night Manager ironed out that story’s wrinkles in favour of creating a glossy thriller, White and Amini celebrate the nuances in Our Kind of Traitor, and particularly in terms of character. Dima, played as a vodka-fuelled but poignant shaggy Russian bear by Skarsgård, is no one’s idea of an ideal defector, while Lewis’s Hector is deliciously amoral, a clipped and apparently emotionless rogue operator who tramples over international law in order to satisfy his own agenda. McGregor, meanwhile, is solidly convincing as a dim but true polar star on the movie’s moral compass in a story that simultaneously celebrates and mocks Dima’s endearing belief in the myth of British fair play. ****
Also reviewed this week are Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and Angry Birds. For the reviews, clickety-click here …
The Artist Formerly Known As Colin Bateman had a nice piece over on the Guardian Book Blog today (Thursday, 3rd), in which he waxed lyrical about the comic crime novel. The gist runneth thusly:
“ … humour in crime fiction is nowadays a rare bird. I was struck by something my friend, thriller writer John Connolly – 7m sales and counting – said at a writing workshop, that comic crime fiction, with rare exceptions, is never going to sell and will forever be frozen out of the major prizes. The Last Laugh Award that my latest book – The Day of the Jack Russell – has picked up is a fantastic honour, but to put it in perspective, it was announced at Bristol’s international convention on crime fiction at the same time as those other biggies, the e-Dunnit Award for best ebook first published in the UK and The Sounds of Crime Award for best abridged and unabridged audiobooks. All three were vastly overshadowed by the concurrent announcement of this year’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger awards shortlist, which is not noticeably troubled by anything likely to put a smile on your face. John Connolly has a point … “Which means, bizarrely, that if you want to find something new and challenging, comic crime fiction is now the place to go. British authors like Robert Lewis, Charlie Williams, Malcolm Pryce, Chris Ewan, Declan Burke and Len Tyler are at the vanguard of a new wave of young writers kicking against the clichés and producing ambitious, challenging, genre-bending works. They may not yet be hogging the bestseller lists but at least they’re adding some wit and balls to a moribund genre. What they’d all probably say, if I could be bothered asking them, is that people who read their books love them, it’s getting them to pick them up in the first place that is the difficulty.”
Now, yours truly is a native-born and horny-handed son of the soil of Eireann, as some of you know and some of you even care. But I’m more than willing to overlook the fact that I’m now - according to Bateman, at least - a subject of Queen Elizabeth II, bless her cotton socks, on the basis that he reckons I’m (a) comic, (b) challenging, (c) loved and (d) young. Said last - young! - being by far the most important attribute, obviously. Take that, mid-life crisis! Bateman, by the way, will be appearing at the Gutter Bookshop next Wednesday, June 9th, where he’ll be waffling at some length about the paperback release of the award-winning THE DAY OF THE JACK RUSSELL. Click on the pic top right for all the details … Elsewhere, Joe Long, a good friend of this blog, and of Irish crime writing in general, forwards me on an article from the Irish Echo celebrating the rise and rise of Irish crime writing. Quoth Joe:
“John Connolly is the pied piper,” said Joe Long, a graduate student at New York University. Ten years ago, he met Connolly at a reading in New York and they became firm friends. Soon, Long, who has lived all of his 58 years in Manhattan, was hooked on Irish crime fiction. “There’re all great,” he said. “It’s not just good crime writing; it’s good Irish writing.”
For more, clickety-click here. But be warned, it mentions me a bit … Actually, I’m having a pretty good week, I have to say. I got a nice email from someone running an on-line book club asking if I’d be interested in BAD FOR GOOD being their July pick, this despite the fact that BAD FOR GOOD has yet to be published. I don’t mind telling you, I was pretty flattered … Speaking of which: we (aka Team Laughably Impossible Dream, aka the group of crack optimists doing their damnedest to inflict the demented wibblings of yours truly on an unsuspecting public) got a little nibble on said BAD FOR GOOD this week, and from a rather impressive source. Protocol demands that I gloss over the details; suffice to say that the house publishes two of the finest crime writers of all time. Again, I’m pretty flattered. And not only that, but it transpires that there are two other houses displaying ‘serious’ interest. All of which amounts to a hill of beans, of course, but hey - only one of those beans needs to be magic, right? On top of all that, it looks like it’s going to be a sunny Bank Holiday, for once. I’m off to the Flat Lake Festival in Monaghan on Saturday June 6th, there to hook up - all going well and Sat Nav permitting - with Brian McGilloway and Ed O’Loughlin, the idea being to (a) promote the bejasus out of two of the finest contemporary Irish authors, (b) chat about THE INFORMER and THE ASSASSIN, the ur-noir novels of Liam O’Flaherty and (c) wonder aloud to no great practical purpose about whether contemporary Irish novels are engaging with the political realities of Ireland today in the way O’Flaherty rather bravely engaged with his. If you’re in the general vicinity of Monaghan, we’ll be yakking it up in the Butty Barn at 2.45pm: do drop by for a heckle or two. For the full Flat Lake Festival line-up - which includes Anne Enright, Alexei Sayle, The Brad Pitt Light Orchestra, Eoin McNamee, Dermot Healy, Shane McGowan, Eugene McCabe, greasy-pig wrassling and generalised debauchery - clickety-click here …
