26 books

If you believe Sky Sports or the majority of Britain’s football writers, the Premier League is the greatest league in the world. Understandably, it’s an image the Premier League is happy to perpetuate. It’s hard to see how a league so hideously uncompetitive as the English Premier League could be held up as an example to the world, until you realise that it’s really about money.

Despite its predictability, the Premier League is the most lucrative football league in the world. However, the money is concentrated at the top, between Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea.

It is this inequality that David Conn is concerned with in his book, The Beautiful Game?. The subtitle - “Searching for the soul of football” - makes Conn’s stance clear. He believes that football belongs to the community and that the pursuit of cash has caused it to lose sight of its purpose. Ordinary fans, especially younger supporters, are being priced out of the game and clubs are being driven to the brink of extinction in an attempt to keep up.

The Beautiful Game?

David Conn. Yellow Jersey Press 2005, Paperback, 432 pages, £4.99

If the book has a villain it’s Arsenal and specifically their former vice-chairman, David Dein. Opening at an Arsenal-Chelsea match in 2003, Conn spins back to the formation of the football league and explains how the Gunners ditched their Woolwich-based fans and moved the club to north London and later, possibly, bribed their way into the first division.

After that, David Dein’s business background comes under scrutiny, in a section that has been carefully worded for legal reasons, before Conn turns his attention to the way that Arsenal bulldozed through Islington, literally, in the process of building a new stadium. Arsenal need a bigger stadium to provide the cost base to maintain a position in the top four but Conn notes that the Emirates Stadium is considerably smaller than Manchester United’s Old Trafford, leaving them still at a disadvantage.

A chapter on Hillsborough, which will probably shock even those who know the story, establishes both the contempt in which the football authorities and club owners hold supporters and the longstanding ineptitude of the Football Association, the supposed guardians of the game at all levels.

The deaths of 96 people at Hillsborough created an appetite for reforming the game. That and the surge in popularity for football created by England’s unexpected semi-final place in the 1990 World Cup are popularly thought to have led to the Premier League - a chance for football to become a respectable family game.

But Conn shows that the Premier League plan was developed from the very beginning as a way to enrich the big clubs. The first step was to stop sharing top-flight TV revenue with the rest of football and instead carve it up among themselves. David Dein fronted the bid for the Premier League and when he took the plan to the FA they simply asked how high he would like them to jump. They saw it as a chance to strike a blow in their petty battles with the Football League but, as Conn shows, there were other plans on the table that would have better met football’s needs.

The result, almost 20 years later, is a league in which the same four clubs have filled the top four places for the last four seasons. The vast amount of money they can spend on transfer fees and player wages has an inflationary effect that is felt throughout the rest of football. Many clubs are bankrupting themselves in the mistaken belief that they can keep up. Conn gives numerous examples of clubs that have done just that, most notably Bradford City.

Possibly the most eye-opening and infuriating chapter comes at the end, when Conn explains how the Premier League has slowly taken control of the FA. Always pathetically weak, the FA is now little more than a puppet organisation for the big clubs.

Is there any hope? Conn sees some potential in the growing involvement of fans in running lower league football clubs and he focuses particularly on AFC Wimbledon, the fan-run club set up when Wimbledon FC moved to Milton Keynes. The stories of life at some of these smaller clubs - Glossop is another that Conn explores - are heartening and make the book well worth reading. Despite the money-centred modern game, small groups of dedicated fans refuse to let their clubs die.

David Conn’s book was written before the Roman Abramovich effect had become clear. The arrival of the Russian robber baron brought billions to Chelsea and bought them a seat at the top table. Money can’t guarantee success, as the consortium in charge of Conn’s club, Manchester City, has discovered, but it is a prerequisite. Abramovich timed his acquisition perfectly, buying his way in just a season after the number of Champions League places available to English clubs grew to four.

Since Conn’s book was last revised - in 2005 - the situation has grown worse. In the 2006-2007 season, revenues for the Big Four averaged £178m. The rest of the Premier League’s clubs averaged £50m. [Link to PDF of data.] The data for 2007-2008, due to be published shortly, is likely to show the gap having widened.

All football supporters should read this book. Those who are not Big Four customers will be horrified by what it contains. Those who are will be forced to adopt uncomfortably contorted arguments to justify their having benefited from a deliberately skewed system - ‘the other teams aren’t trying hard enough’ being a current favourite.

The game has been taken away from the fans, the league is now unwinnable by any team without multi-billion-pound backing and it may already be too late to do anything about it.

I was surprised to find that David Frost was involved in the play Frost/Nixon, which later spawned the Hollywood movie and this opportunistic repackaging (rather disingenuously passed off as a ’sequel’ in a brief author’s note) of his earlier I Gave Them a Sword. Both play and movie portray Frost as a shallow, know-nothing, toothy idiot who stumbled into an interview with the freshly disgraced ex-President Nixon.

Of course I had forgotten that there is something more important to David Frost than his pride or reputation: money.

Frost/Nixon

David Frost. Harper Perennial 2007, Paperback, 384 pages, £10.06

This book is a pretty feeble attempt to redress the balance of the impression given by the play and book. By Frost’s own account, filled with his characteristic lack of modesty, his interviews were a defining moment in Presidential and world history. Whereas, in fact, they are not even a footnote in modern biographies of Nixon.

The entire reputation of the project rests on the myth - ably puffed by Frost himself - that he somehow got Nixon to ‘confess’ to his Watergate crimes. In fact he did no such thing. When Frost has him on the hook, he suddenly releases the pressure and allows Nixon to go off on yet another sentimental ramble about ‘letting people down’ and how he cried just before making his resignation speech. In Frost’s world, this is what passes for an incisive interview.

Here’s the key section:

Frost: You explained that you got caught up in this thing [i.e. obstruction of justice] … you’ve explained your motives. I don’t want to quibble about any of that, but just coming to the sheer substance, would you go further than “mistakes”

This tells you everything you need to understand about Frost’s outlook. ‘Quibbling’ about the details of Nixon’s participation in a conspiracy to obstruct justice (from within the Oval Office!), is not his idea of ’substance’. No, he’d rather get Nixon on tape having a little blub instead.

Nixon’s preparation for the interviews was incredibly impressive. He had committed details of not only what he and his associates had said in public and in private, but what he’d been publicly revealed to have said. As soon as Frost mentions a quote from a tape that had not been made public at that time, Nixon makes sure to understand where the quote is coming from, so that he can decide whether to brazen it out or not. This shows that Nixon’s basic approach - that had failed him so badly during Watergate - was to lie first, and try to tie up to loose ends as they appeared, and had not changed even after the trauma of being, in effect, removed from office.

A more skilled interviewer than Frost might have been able to pull at the fraying edges of Nixon’s defence and unravel the whole thing. As it is, all we’re left with is the tantalising prospect of Nixon actually admitting to crimes. From a legal point of view, he would have been protected by President Ford’s pardon. Instead we’re left with the satisfaction that history has passed its own verdict, in spite of Frost’s interview.

The non-Watergate parts of the book - and these make up the majority of it - are very routine and boring, especially now that they are somewhat dead issues. The true extent of Nixon’s disastrous handling of the Vietnam war, Chile and other things are poorly served by this book.

Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and here, over the course of 600 or so pages, he leads us through the story of classical music in the 20th century. Beginning with the premier of Strauss’s Salome in 1906, Ross covers the decadence of the Twenties and the depression of the Thirties before considering music under the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin and the post-war avant garde.

As someone who knows little about classical music I was fascinated by Ross’s narrative. His enthusiasm for his subject is clear and infectious. As a writer myself I was impressed by his skill. He describes so many works and composers and yet manages to keep his descriptions fresh and engaging.

The Rest is Noise

Alex Ross. Fourth Estate Ltd 2008, Hardcover, 624 pages, £10.50

The pre-war sections are the most interesting, perhaps because there’s a lot more to tell. Classical music slipped out of the mainstream after the war with the rise of popular culture and that’s reflected on the page. The post-war years are dealt with in just a third of the book.

Though the jacket claims that Ross covers “music, from The Rite of Spring to the Velvet Underground”, the book isn’t about popular music at all. One chapter nods towards jazz, or at least Duke Ellington, and the Velvet Underground receive about two pages.

Ross deals with each style of music or school of thought by focusing on one composer. This is a good idea but its success depends on the composer chosen. I found that the chapter on Benjamin Britten dragged but I was more interested than I expected to be in Jean Sibelius and Charles Ives.

Although the book is organised chronologically, Ross frequently jumps backwards or forwards in time to make connections elsewhere. It’s an effective technique and one that mirrors the music Ross describes.

However, while the writing is good, the editing is shocking. The book is littered with typos: avant-garde is spelled “avant-grade” on at least three occasions and grandiose appears as “grandoise”. Another page has Ross saying that “the Berlin Wall was broached in 1989…” instead of breached, one assumes.

Worse are embarrassingly bad sentences such as this one: “Three years before he was born, Transylvania became part of Romania, and Ligeti went to study at the conservatory in Cluj…”

I read the book in hardback so perhaps someone has fixed those howlers for the paperback edition. As it is they undermine the seriousness of an otherwise exemplary exercise in criticism.

I’ve read a few books about American football but this one is the best. It traces the development of the left tackle position over the last 30 years and, alongside that, tells the story of Michael Oher, a boy from the Memphis ghetto whose life may just be transformed by his physique, which is perfect for playing left tackle. Lewis’s insight into NFL strategy is fantastic but equally fascinating is the examination of the class and race divide in America.

Michael Oher is 16 when we meet him, the barely literate child of a drug-addicted mother. Schools have often given him passing grades just to get rid of him. By chance he ends up at Briarcrest Christian School where for the first time people take an interest in his education. Meanwhile, the sport coaches are amazed that the 6′4 teenager, who weighs more than 20 stone, can move so fast.

The Blind Side

M Lewis. W. W. Norton & Co. 2007, Paperback, 320 pages, £4.97

Another chance encounter leads to his adoption by a rich white family, who help Oher to develop his social skills, force him to study and buy him the first bed he has ever had. They also help him progress as an American football player.

This is no easy task. Oher has barely played the sport - he dreamed of being a basketball pro, refusing to accept that he was too heavy. Lewis relates several very funny episodes as Oher learns the sport. In one incident, he snaps after being taunted by an opponent throughout the game. He lifts the player, who weighs 15 stone or so, off the ground, charges him down the field, onto the sideline, across the bench and is finally stopped by the fence at the side of the field. When asked where he was taking the player, he says he planned to put him back on the bus.

For years left tackles were seen as interchangeable parts of the offensive line. They were insignificant and paid as such. Lewis traces the history of the game and shows how the art of sacking the quarterback - tackling him while he still has the ball - became an increasingly important defensive tactic.

The defensive ends and linebackers trying to get the sack realised that their best chance came from the QB’s blind side which, with most quarterbacks being right handed, is usually the left. Thus the man protecting the blind side, the left tackle, became more important and increasingly highly paid.

As Lewis points out, Michael Oher could easily have been lost to the ghetto, where his most promising career prospect was as bodyguard for the local drug dealer. His starting point in life virtually condemned him to a similar fate as his parents - one a drug addict, the other murdered. Instead, on April 25, 2009, he’ll be drafted into the NFL as a left tackle, the highest-paid position on the field after the quarterback.

It’s tempting to recommend this book to anyone who is interested in contemporary American society but the sections on American football strategy may bore the average reader. However, this is an essential read for anyone who is interested in American football or American sport in general.

And so to the end. The tenth and final Martin Beck novel has the Swedish detective and his team trying to stop a team of highly-trained international terrorists who plan to assassinate a visiting American senator. It’s a plot more suited to an action movie and sits oddly with the wry police procedural style of most of the series.

The biggest weakness of the series has been a tendency towards Hollywood-style set pieces, notably in The Laughing Policeman and The Abominable Man. This is a more significant example than in previous books but it’s still undercut by the authors’ dry humour and by their belief that coincidence will find a way to ruin the most detailed plans.

The Terrorists (The Martin Beck Series)

Maj Sjowall. HarperPerennial 2007, Paperback, 288 pages, £0.01

Mostly it seems odd that Martin Beck, who is head of the National Murder Squad, would be put in charge of protecting a visiting politician. Is he the only capable policeman in Sweden? Well actually, as the authors have carefully demonstrated over previous books, he more or less is.

Alongside the terrorist threat there’s the case of a pornographer beaten to death at his mistress’s house and a woman arrested for attempted bank robbery. The woman lived as a virtual outcast within Swedish society and was naive enough to believe that the bank would give her money if she simply asked. Her character is used, in none-too-subtle fashion, to explore some of the iniquities of Swedish society. The whole thing is slightly unconvincing.

Despite working with a couple of implausible plots, Sjowall and Wahloo manage to make the book genuinely suspenseful. As the day of the politician’s visit unfolds, it’s hard to know whether all of Beck’s team, even Beck himself, will survive.

A word on the translation, which I found disappointing. Joan Tate felt the need to translate the dialogue of Kvastmo, one of the policemen, into Cockney, presumably to convey his stupidity. That was jarring, not least because I don’t remember any of the previous translators doing that. It’s as if Kvastmo turned into Dick van Dyke between books.

It’s worth mentioning that Joan Tate translated four of the books in the series and they were the ones I enjoyed the least. Indeed, the only other time I complained about a translation, while writing about The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, it was one of hers.

Overall, The Terrorists is a disappointing end to a strong series. It’s not a bad book at all. In fact it’s a decent thriller. But at it’s best the Martin Beck series was more than that.

The penultimate Martin Beck novel is about contrasts and the changes in Swedish society since the series began. Martin Beck, now head of the National Murder Squad, is called to sleepy part of the country to investigate a woman’s disappearance. What Beck doesn’t know is that the woman has already been murdered, her body dumped in a swamp.

As Beck hunts for clues he comes under pressure to arrest Folke Bengtsson, the killer he put behind bars in Roseanna, the first novel in the series. Bengtsson has now been released and lives nearby. Beck doesn’t think Bengtsson did it, nor does his partner Lennart Kollberg, indeed both men begin to wonder whether Bengtsson was guilty of the killing of Roseanna McGraw at all.

Cop Killer (The Martin Beck Series)

Maj Sjowall. HarperPerennial 2007, Paperback, 288 pages, £0.01

The media swarms over the little town and among the journalists is the man who was convicted of murder in the second novel of the series, The Man Who Went Up In Smoke. The presence of these two killers, one who may not be guilty at all and another who killed by accident, raises a theme from previous books: there are different kinds of murder and different kinds of guilt.

The idea of Sweden’s decline is further explored when the action cuts back to Stockholm and a shoot-out between two young men and three policemen. One of the men escapes, shocked after his partner guns down two of the policemen before being shot dead. In a touch of irony, typical of Sjowall and Wahloo, both policemen survive but the third dies, stung by a wasp after he dives into a ditch to take cover.

The fugitive ‘cop killer’ will accidentally provide the solution to Martin Beck’s murder case but that’s not really important. What matters is the juxtaposition of the sleepy countryside with the violent city and the tension between the ever decreasing number of capable police officers and the growing number of incompetent or corrupt ones.

Kollberg increasingly despairs while Beck goes on trying to make what difference he can. The book has a surprisingly light tone, largely because of the addition of Hergott Allwright (called Hergott Nojd in Swedish - which I assume is a mildly comic name, just as Allwright is in English). Nevertheless, the good humour can’t hide the fact that this is one of the bleakest novels in the series.

With all this crime fiction I’ve been reading over the last year or so, I thought it would be interesting to read an academic book on the subject. Crime Fiction is part of the New Critical Idiom series, which is designed to provide students with an introduction to key areas of literary criticism. That’s exactly what John Scaggs provides here; unfortunately I found the book too shallow.

After a thoughtful introduction to crime fiction as a whole, Scaggs examines its various sub-genres in a broadly chronological fashion. The first two chapters look at the roots of crime fiction, going as far back as the Bible, and its role in reinforcing behavioural norms in society. From there he moves on to the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction and its preoccupation with crimes among the aristocracy, which fascinated readers in the early part of the 20th century.

Crime Fiction (New Critical Idiom)

John Scaggs. Routledge 2005, Paperback, 184 pages, £8.24

While the ‘Golden Age’ was predominantly British, American writers of the same period were developing the ‘hardboiled’ mode, in which wisecracking private detectives dealt with slightly grimier crimes, though often also within the dominant social class. Next Scaggs considers the police procedural, which shifts the focus from individual brilliant detectives to teams of ordinary policemen and women dealing with crime in big cities.

Those are the most significant sub-genres but Scaggs also adds a chapter on what he calls ‘crime thrillers’ - serial killer thrillers, legal thrillers and thrillers starring forensic examiners and the like - and one on historical crime fiction. A short look at post-modern crime fiction rounds off the book.

It’s a good introduction to the genre but I felt that I’ve already read too widely for it to be of use. I’ve read many of the books Scaggs covers and, where I haven’t read the specific books, I’ve read other works by many of the authors in question.

I also felt there were some omissions. Most significantly, it strikes me as odd that any chapter on police procedurals would not include Sjowall and Wahloo’s Martin Beck series. As the introductions to the recent editions show, many of today’s crime writers were influenced by the Swedish series. Non-English language works are given short shrift throughout, overall. France is represented only by Simenon, Italy has to make do with British author Michael Dibdin and the wealth of crime fiction from Scandinavia is scarcely mentioned. Recent developments in crime fiction from Asia and other parts of the world, for example, Mexico, are ignored entirely.

The highlight, for me, was the section on The Name of the Rose, which Scaggs breaks down over a couple of pages. It brought to my attention a lot of references, particularly a couple of direct quotes from Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, that had escaped me when I read Umberto Eco’s novel. I would have enjoyed reading similar breakdowns of other significant texts.

Still, this is meant to be a short introduction and there’s only so much Scaggs could cover. This is ideal for its purpose - introducing undergraduates to crime fiction - but anyone who has read even moderately widely in the genre will find little of value here.

Luke Haines, the curmudgeonly, darkly sarcastic misanthrope behind The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder, is unsurprisingly scathing about Britpop, the musical movement that dominated the 90s. In Bad Vibes, Haines offers his view of the Britpop years, as he watched the scene he helped to create turn monstrous and stomp across the country.

Beginning in late 1991, as he was preparing the first Auteurs record, and ending in late 1997, with the first Black Box Recorder album being finished, Haines focuses on “what I thought then, not necessarily what I think now”. The result is a vicious and hilarious savaging of British alternative music in the 90s.

As a self-confessed egomaniac, Haines has barely a good word to say about anyone else. During the course of the book he aims barbs at Damon Albarn, Justine Frischmann, Sting, Brett Anderson, Chris Evans and numerous others. He’s not even that taken with his own band. James Banbury, the Auteurs’ cellist, is never referred to by name; he is simply The Cellist.

Bad Vibes

Luke Haines. William Heinemann Ltd 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £6.37

Mostly though, Haines reserves his ire for the “rinky-dink Britpoppers” whose music is distracting the masses from his own masterpieces - and he is convinced that at least two of the Auteurs albums are masterpieces.

But the book is not a bitter exercise in score settling. Well, not entirely. At worst, it’s a very funny exercise in score settling. In addition, it’s a very honest portrayal of life in a mid-level band. There are drug busts as the Auteurs travel through Europe and a Spinal Tap-esque tour of the US with most of the dates cancelled and the band reduced to playing sports bars.

I’ve never been sure how seriously to take Haines’s misanthropy. Is he really that spiteful, is it just a pose or is he just amusing himself? I suspect the latter. Haines seems equally happy sarcastically belittling his own achievements as he is savaging others. Even his proclaimed self image - the bitter genius, shunned by a moronic public - seems to be partly tongue-in-cheek.

Perhaps that’s just me. I’ve enjoyed Haines’s music for a long time and I like his persona. Others are less keen, notably Louise Wener, the former singer for Sleeper, who savaged Bad Vibes in the Observer recently. Anything that annoys Wener - who since her days with the godawful Sleeper has turned her inconspicuous talents to writing - must have something going for it. Perhaps she was just annoyed that Haines spelt her name wrong.

There are quite a few names spelt wrong, in fact. That’s probably something Haines’s editor should have picked up. It’s more problematic that Haines is a mediocre writer. His writing is energetic, descriptive and, as mentioned above, funny but he writes very clumsy sentences. He’s also pretty lousy as a rock critic. His descriptions of music, whether he’s praising it or criticising it, are cliched and uninspired.

Never mind. It’s a great book, in spite of that. Anyone who followed indie music in the 90s will enjoy it immensely.

I’m in Scotland, so there are a lot of clouds around. Clouds and rain and the occasional happy moment when the sun breaks through for an hour or a day.

The Cloudspotter’s Guide

Gavin Pretor-Pinney. Sceptre 2006, Hardcover, 320 pages, £10.00

Gavin Pretor-Pinney loves those moments, and thinks that the contrast between the sun and shade are what makes the good weather enjoyable. Where’s the joy in unending sunshine, he asks. It’s a pretty banal question, but he asks it so charmingly I whizzed through his few hundred pages with hardly a pause.

Meteorology can be pretty dry stuff, but Pretor-Pinney has a wonderfully direct and enthusiastic writing style that I found myself turning back to the pages with cloud classification tables on them that I’d skipped over to begin with and actually trying to learn them by heart. I haven’t tried to do that with anything since school, and I didn’t like it then. Here I was, doing it for fun.

Now I can tell my altocirrus from my stratocumulus and on Tuesday I found that if I stood with my back to the wind and looked at the developing clouds on my right, I knew how they would develop and that it would start raining in the morning. I beamed as the drops hit the windows on Wednesday at breakfast.

It’s not perfect - the photographs are quite poorly reproduced and there are some contradictory ideas about climate change floating around, but it’s an informative and engaging text on something we see every day. Highly recommended.

In 1929, Father Ronald Knox published his Detective Story Decalogue, a list of ten rules for writing detective stories. The list was an attempt to ensure ‘fair play’ on the part of writers and to give readers a reasonable chance to solve the mystery before the detective. Knox’s rules include such imperatives as “the criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story” and proposed a limit on the use of secret passages, twin brothers and Chinamen.

Sins for father Knox

Josef Skvorecký. Lester & Orpen Dennys 1988, Unknown Binding, 292 pages, £48.29

More than 40 years later, in 1973, Josef Skvorecky wrote this book of short stories, each of which breaks one of Father Knox’s rules. It’s a testament to the Czech author’s abilities that the stories work not only as satire but also as mysteries in their own right.

The first story stars Lieutenant Boruvka, the Prague-based detective who had already appeared in one of Skvorecky’s novels and would go on to appear in two more. Boruvka is interviewing a woman, Eve Adam, whom he believes has been wrongly imprisoned for murder. He manages to find the real killer and Adam goes free. The subsequent stories follow her to Sweden, Italy and America as she is embroiled in one crime mystery after another.

Though the tone of the writing pays homage to the hardboiled fiction of the 30s and 40s, the plotting has more in common with the puzzle-form stories of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Having set up each mystery, Skvorecky stops and challenges the reader to identify the criminal and which of Father Knox’s rules has been broken in the story. It’s surprisingly difficult. I spotted five of the ten broken rules but even towards the end of the book, with fewer rules remaining to be broken, Skvorecky sews red herrings that make guessing tricky.

It’s a very enjoyable book. Anyone who enjoys detective fiction should try to get hold of a copy.