...so far so few

Right in the middle of writing another book review I remembered that I’m supposed to be looking at this for my Pee Haitch Dee where I'm going to be looking at mapping football fiction. Ye know carving out the corners of my own shadows and an area of expertise, a wee niche if ye like, so if nothing else, the peeps at Uni think I know what I’m talking about. Regular readers of this wee bubble in the bath full of washing liquid world that is blogger may already have worked out the ruse.

Okay seriously, this is where thesimplestgame is up to.

As far as I can tell and this is absolutely disputable, there are maybe 60 -70 books which could be classed as football fiction. I reckon that’s about three good shelves worth in my artistic hovel.

The young adult fiction in Gracie, Megs, Jasper and a couple of other very similar examples, its probably the only place in the book world where the concentration is so great. Almost a whole shelf worth by the time you tie in the sequels.

There’s the Hoolie lit with the likes of your John King trilogy, the largest part of the Dougie Brimson collection (see Dougie's own site)) and more recent discoveries such as Away Days by Kevin Sampson giving fans with a taste for football related pugilism something to read. It's a section which probably takes up about the next most space. It's an area I’m going to revisit soon.

There are, relatively speaking, loads of good short story collections from Nicholas Royle’s A Book of Two Halves, For Whom the Ball Rolls by Ian Plenderleith and my personal favourite The Hope that Kills Us edited by Adrian Searle are all good examples.

There’s lipstick football fiction with the likes of Karren Brady and Siobhan Curham specialising in the WAGS – wives and girlfriends – view of the game.

In Dominic Holland and Des Dillon’s books The Ripple Effect and ...The Busby Babes respectively, if not respectably, there’s the tales of teams saved from extinction by hair brained schemes and ghosts of football past.

There are crossovers too. In Pitch Black there’s dark emotive lad lit. and other male masculinity crises in the likes of The Man Who Hated Football by Will Buckley. In Sexy Football there’s some soft porn and there's even some detective stuff in the Montalban book Offside.

And of course there’s The Damned United, the literary end of the football fiction shelf, while fan fiction like that of Roddy Doyle in The Van and other places, Jonathon Tulloch's The Season Ticket and at a non-fcition stretch Hornby's Fever Pitch all mingle in the stand.

I’ve to review some of these yet and there’s a few more I know of that I aim to acquire in the coming months.

If this article felt like one of those episodes in a sitcom where they sit on the couch and remember all the funny stuff that happened to them over the years (usually for lack of a script), that’s because it was. Mind you, this wasn’t about saving myself anything, it was about keeping track. There’s nothing worse than when you stop to watch a game in the park and it’s half way through and you don’t know what the score is. Well now you do. Football fiction eh? There’s a bit more to it than I expected.

The Hand of God and the 2008 Euros.

I’ve been feasting on the European Championships. If football was food I’d look like Maradona does now… but I’ll get back to him.

There’s nothing for it, Austria and Switzerland have played host to an awesome display of the beautiful game. Has to be one of the best international tournaments in my life time. I can’t remember watching better.

Not a single team had a solid defence. Poor for the players, excellent for spectators. Goals everywhere. Analogies with sieve’s and other things with holes in have been rife. People thought there was no way Russia would lose that many goals to the Spaniards a second time not after the way they done the Dutch. The ball is round right enough.

Thanks must go to the nations of Europe who, in leaving their defensive tactics at home, made a valuable contribution to a rare football extravaganza, one that really has lived up to the hype.

Only a couple of games have been a bit lumpy, most notably Italy vs Spain (wince!), but the plot, being completely unpredictable, thickened all the way to the finale where the Spanish Armada finally grabbed the gold. I'm pleased for them and for football too.

With so many twists, turns and goals the entire football show had all the makings of a good drama. It made me wonder if the novella I’m knocking together for my PhD, which is tied to the 2010 World Cup, will maintain the same level of excitement. I also wondered if there’s any other football fiction set at or during a specific international tournament.

I did think of three which come close…

The third, and arguably best written, of John King’s ‘hoolie-lit’ trilogy England Away sees his Chelsea head hunters make some violent appearances in Holland and Germany on their way to watch their national team clash in an international fixture. I don’t think it would count as a tournament based football fiction.

The same would be said for me old mate, Dougie Brimson’s (see the interview) The Crew. It's about a team of football fans, three crews actually, who plan and execute a hoolie-handed Italian Job while England play the Azzuri in Italy. The old bill try to stop them scoring, but their defence is a bit like the Germans.


The Hand of God Squad are a couple of opportunistic Scotland fans who’ve named themselves after that famous moment in Argentina’s defeat of England in the World Cup (22 June 1986). Gordon Legge penned a wee cracker for the The Hope That Kills Us about the lads and how girls and love get in the away of their international game attendance record. Again its not tournament based, but it has the most games in it.

I will take a closer look at the football fiction of Legge and King in future posts.

I can’t think of any other examples. Maybe you know some, maybe you’re writing one. I’d really appreciate it if someone could point me towards any good, bad or indifferent offerings. They'd be worth their weight in eh...burgers?

Talking about football fiction with Alan Bissett

Alan Bissett has been mentioned in this blog before. He's a Scottish writer. For his literary efforts, he's been getting called a doyen and rating mentions in places like the List's top 100 cool eh, things. At the moment he's working on some more fictional largesse and plans to revisit the peeps in his first novel BOYRACERS. His last book THE INCREDIBLE ADAM SPARK is excellent too. Well worth reading for any number of reasons. None of them are football related right enough.

A wee while ago, he wrote a short story for the THE HOPE THAT KILLS US football writing anthology, so I wrote to him and asked him if he'd maybe talk about football fiction for us. And he did.

TheSimplestGame: What made you choose to write A Minute's Silence? What's behind it, your inspiration? How did you get involved with The Hope...?

Alan Bissett: A MINUTE'S SILENCE was written specifcially with the theme of the anthology in mind, so it had to be based around football, but I did want to use it to explore issues that are bigger than football, and in Scotland there are few more important issues than that of religious sectarianism. It's difficult to grow up as a young male in Scotland without being touched by this in some way, and while it wasn't quite as fierce as it is in Glasgow, that Catholic/Protestant shite still reached us in Falkirk. Looking back on it now I can see how my young mind was being warped politically by the simple issue of supporting a football team and I wanted to explore that. Football can be divisive at the best of times, but in Scotland it is particularly sharp, and I thought I'd be shirking my responsiblity if I didn't recognise that.

TSG: One of the great strengths in your work is voice, you are able capture the patter, the sense of time and place and all the stuff that goes with it in these really fascinating characters, how do you think you are able to do this?
AB: All I wanted to do was write as genuinely as I could about the world around me, and certainly when I was young my friends and I communicated in a language composed of film, sitcom, music and football references. That pop-culture world was as much a dialect to us as the Falkirk accent that we spoke with. I wasn't conscious of doing anything other than to show how this 'stuff' informs the very fabric of people's character and the way they interact with each other. If I'm able to do it well, it's because that 'is' the natural voice of contemporary society - from Dunoon to Denver. How often have you been trying to describe a situation to someone by saying, 'It was like that epidsode of Friends/The Simpsons/The Sopranos when X says to Y....' And yes, for a lot of men, football is a culture and language all of its own, which includes or excludes the same as any other culture and language. I'm just reflecting the reality of that."

TSG: There seems to be a general belief that men prefer reading non-fiction over fiction – it's been put forward as one of the reasons for the dearth of football fiction. Do you think this is true and do you prefer reading non-fiction or fiction?
AB: It would seem - if marketing statistics are correct - that most men do prefere reading non-fiction, and certainly as I've grown older I've started to read a lot more of it: whether on history, popular science or politics. The advantage of fiction is that it can explore the psychology and motivations of characters in a way that is dramatically exciting, but the disadvantage is that you can only learn so much 'about' the world from fiction, as it just does not have a duty to record the facts in the same way that non-fiction does. I think it's probably healthy to read in both areas.

TSG: Do you think there is a defined market for football fiction?
AB: There's a market for any kind of fiction, as long as it's good. But I do think the market is smaller, for reasons I'll soon come to.

TSG: Another theory is that footballers are better at expressing themselves with a ball than a pen, why do you think there is so little fiction about a sport which is so popular?
AB: I think the difference is that most people whose main interest is football *tend* not to be big readers of quality fiction; most readers of quality fiction *tend* not to be football fans. If you want to do any reading about football, there are newspapers, magazines and non-fiction books by the dozen devoted to it. There are online forums where you can discuss the game with other fans. Given what I said about fiction being poorly equipped with facts - and football being a game based on speculation based on statistics - fiction would not seem to be the most natural place to go for insight .

That said, David Peace's THE DAMNED UNITED is one of the best novels I've ever read, let alone novels about football. It elevates the game - and Brian Clough in particular - to the level of Shakespearean tragedy, which massive egoes, obsessions and personal demons exposed for the reader to see. It's epic! More exciting than football itself, as far as this reader is concerned. Fiction deals with characters and narratives, which is why Clough's enormous personality and the twists and turns of his story are perfect material. But let's be honest, most footballers and managers are fairly blank. They're athletes. Their story takes place before us on the pitch. There's often little fiction can do to supplement it that no fan can do for himself as he watches.

You can buy these books on Amazon, or go straight to Alan Bissett's My Space page or the Alan Bissett website in the links on the subs bench (on yer right).

The Season Ticket

Jonathan Tulloch (the man, not the horse) has written a whole bunch of award winning short stories, four novels, won numerous prizes and awards including New Zealand’s lucrative Betty Trask Award (2000) for his debut, The Season Ticket, and the JB Priestley Award for The Lottery (2003). In 2004 he was on the TLS list of the twenty best young writers. He’s recently co-written a piece of children’s fiction with his wife.

The Season Ticket, the book this blog is interested in, is a tale of two wee Geordie boys trying to raise the cash for a seat at St. James’s Park for a season.

Sewell and Gerry live in Gateshead, home of one of Europes biggest shopping centres and all those clipped and busy industrial city streets. Like George and Lenny in Steinbeck’s book, Sewell has strength and Gerry is wee and wily. They never go to school and they’ve never got any money. Looking at the superstructure that houses their beloved Noocastle United they decide to raise the enough cash to watch the games. But the best laid plans of their almost impossible goal sets them on a frequently funny and sometimes heart crushingly poignant series of adventures.

Tulloch also penned an excellent film adaptation of the book called, Purely Belter. Directed by Mark Herman (Brassed Off and Little Voice), it even featured a cameo from Noocastle’s favourite son, Alan Shearer.

While the film unfortunately suffered from comparisons with Herman’s other more successful and popular works, the book stands on its own as an excellent read, whether you’re interested in football fiction or not. It offers a finely tuned perspective on the fragility of the human condition, but more importantly (for this blog in particular) it offers a stunning insight into the hope that football gives us.

Besides the top drawer wallow in financial excess enjoyed and perpetuated by big clubs and Roy Keane’s, prawn sandwich munching and happy to pay through the nose for it, fans, the most romantic of footballing notions resolutely survives. No matter the volume of love, devotion or cash we pour over it, each new season and each new signing enflames our limitless hope and grants us the power to believe irrational promises can be fulfilled. The Hope That Kills Us right enough.

Like many of his contemporaries (as far as I know) Tulloch’s only ever written one piece of football fiction. There must be a reason for that. I’d love to know what it is. Nevertheless, I hold out the hope that he will write another.

The Hope That Kills Us

Besides bringing attention to my own work I wanted to use this blog to highlight football fiction and the worthy (and unworthy) of their place in the sub genre. I’ve already made a glancing header at a couple of really very good examples.

The one for the day is the magnificently titled The Hope That Kills Us. It’s a feckin’ belter. Here’s the official line on what it is…

'Scottish football is the weirdest of organisms, simultaneously compelling and repulsive in equal measure. The Hope That Kills Us brings together specially commissioned stories from some of Scotland's best contemporary writers. Each story examines, from its own unique viewpoint, the participants, observers, experience and emotion that feed our nation's obsession with football.

Unlike so much stuff in our worlds today, it does exactly what it says on the label. The Hope… wonderfully reflects football’s integral part in our culture. The joy, the sorrow, the nightmare’s, the humour, the misery, the people. It’s magic. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The people who put it together commissioned 8 leading lights in Scottish fiction for contributions and looked to writers groups in local communities, Uni’s and even some operating from big hooses like Glenochil to add an additional 5 - the paperback edition includes a couple of further additions.

There are too many highlights to mention here. There’s not a dud among them. Des Dillon’s emotive farmer’s tale, Heatherstone’s Question, Gordon Legge’s Hand of God Squad, an exquisite tale of what it is to follow our national team and This is My Story, This is My Song, Laura Hird’s take on the football widow’s revenge are sublime. They are not the only ones though.

I’ve cited both Billy Cornwall’s Jesus Saves and Andrew C Ferguson’s Nae Cunt Said Anything in my theoretical piece for my MA, purely because of their depiction of the game from the pitch. Ferguson’s story is a personal favourite. It’s about hard faced giant sized faeries and wishfully gifted players wasted with drink, how could it not be?

I really like the novels, Boyracers and The Incredible Adam Spark, (http://www.alanbissett.com) so I was fair pleased when Alan Bissett’s picture of the mentality of the great green ’n blue divide, A Minute’s Silence lived up to expectation. It concisely captures the best/worst of the Central Scotland (my home) mindset while beautifically underlining what it is that brings football people together and makes us love it so…

“That connection in a pass, reaching somebody across empty green space…”(pg133)

“…fitbas a mystery eh. Its aw in the glances, the breathin, the beatin ae yer heart; that’s whaur it lives. Somethin tae dae wi bein alive. Mortal. Its no scarfs and fuckin badges thats for sure.”(pg134)

Obviously being about the Old Firm, it’s about what divides us as well – the simultaneously compelling and repulsive.

Editor Adrian Searle has done such a good job of stitching it all together, it looks like a Sunday morning size 5 Mitre ready for a kickabout in the park. Well rounded, well played and well, just about the best collection of football fiction I’ve managed to get my hands on so far.