Why England Lose

Simon Kuper
HarperSport 2010, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

It’s quite clearly influenced by the success of Freakonomics – indeed, in the US it’s called Soccernomics. The publishing industry’s infatuation with economic analyses of x, y and, in all likelihood, z might be on the wane but if you’ve been dying to publish an economist’s perspective on flower arranging, say, or spot welding, then there’s probably never been a better time.

Kuper and Szymanski’s thesis is that success in international football can be largely explained by three factors: population size, GDP and international experience. Thus countries that have played a lot of international matches over many years, richer countries or countries with larger populations will tend to do better.

Of course, that’s not the same as saying those countries will always do better but they will tend to. Brazil, for example, vastly out-perform their expected level based on those factors. Even England do a little bit better than a country with its resources would be expected to.

There’s an implied contradiction, then, in the fact that the authors proceed to analyse ways that England could perform better. If England are already out-performing expectations, what’s the problem? The point is that, like Brazil, England could do even better with the right focus and priorities.

So Kuper and Szymanski look at some of the problems at the root of English football: a failure to seek middle class players, an inability to effectively judge talent and an entrenched discrimination against women and ethnic minorities. One of the most interesting sections of the book deals with racism and demonstrates statistically that black players were discriminated against by football clubs as recently as the 1980s.

There’s a fascinating analysis of international football, examining the countries that have the ‘most passionate’ football supporters and looking at the countries that, accounting for population, GDP and experience, are the biggest over-performers.

Another highlight is the account of the penalty shoot-out between Manchester United and Chelsea in the 2008 Champions League final. Chelsea, the authors reveal, had been briefed on the penalty-taking and penalty-saving tendencies of the United players. It almost paid off, they explain, but for John Terry’s failure to score.

Terry’s miss underlines something that the authors overlook. Examining penalty shoot-outs in terms of game theory and statistical tendencies is all very well but it, as Ken Bray explains in How To Score, a properly struck penalty is unsaveable.

The other flaw, from my point of view, is the book’s dismissal of the problem of imbalance in English – and to a lesser extent European – football. The fact that just three clubs – Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal – dominate the Premier League should not concern us, they argue, because people are still going to matches. If people wanted a balanced league, say the authors, then they wouldn’t turn up.

The authors argue that English football has always been dominated by a few big clubs. However, they give insufficient weight to the fact that this imbalance has become greater in the Premier League era, something that seems to me to be bad for English football.

Still, they make a strong case and their argument is worth reading, as is the book as a whole. Why England Lose offers an interesting perspective on the sport and is filled with unexpected nuggets of information and intriguing anecdotes.

Related posts:

1. Why England Lose by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski (James’s 12, 2010)
2. The Wages of Wins by David Berri, Martin Schmidt, Stacey Brook (Shane’s book 28, 2009)
3. America’s Game by Michael MacCambridge (Shane’s book 32, 2009)

Shop Girl Diaries (Salt Modern Lives)

Emily Benet
Salt Publishing 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where I live, through the @Se1 account. Even though it’s square-shaped. For some reason this really grinds my gears. I like books to be book-shaped, otherwise I feel like I’m reading an accordion or a copy of Meg and Mog. Also, I worry about dropping it in the bath.

Anyway, this is a lovely book, and one that proves slight isn’t a bad thing. Emily Benet works in her mother’s chandelier shop on Tower Bridge Road and chronicles their regulars, successful and dodgy haggles and her own love affair.

The half-Spanish Benet (you’ll wish you were half-Spanish too when you read about her trips to Spain and South American travels) writes beautifully, even though there’s not always lots to write about. This started life as a blog (which Benet still writes, to award-winning effect). It will be really interesting to see what her first novel will be like, because she writes with an irresistible combination of delicacy and sureness of touch that for some reason makes me think of the Cat in the story, and how it would write if it told the story of that time it looked at the King.

The story is slight – not a lot happens beyond Emily and her mum continually trying to close down their shop and failing thanks to their keen customers, and an occasional tangle in Emily’s relationship – but as a portrayal of life in London and a side to London you don’t necessarily get to see it has real charm. It works best of all as an introduction to a writer who is clearly going to do very exciting things with words and, hopefully book-shaped, books.

Related posts:

1. Youth by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 25, 2009)
2. Pink Pony, Catherine Carey (Kat’s book 3, 2010)
3. The Boy With The Top Knot by Sathnam Sanghera (Kat’s book 2, 2010)

Among the Mad

Jacqueline Winspear
John Murray 2010, Paperback, 352 pages, £7.99

Anyway, it turns out the Kent-born Winspear is no such thing: she writes today, but now lives in California, where I hope she will soon develop soupy-eyes and a matronly attitude. And while Maisie Dodds is indeed set in the 1930s, it’s not fluffy and there’s very little 30s slang.

Maisie Dodds is a working class gel made good. Having been trained into investigations by her mentor Dr Maurice Blanche, she has taken over his practise and helps the police with their enquiries as well as her individual clients. Maisie is a rather uninspiring creation to follow, an unemotional woman with almost zen-like levels of self-control (at one point a man commits suicide via bomb in front of her and she barely raises an eyebrow). But Winspear puts in enough detail about Maisie’s past life to make this work as a stand-alone read as well as part of a series. The sheen soon comes off this zen once we find out that Maisie worked as nurse with shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, slowly lost her lover to shell shock and suffered a breakdown herself a year before.

This works very well as an inbetween to Pat Barker’s infinitely harsher Regeneration trilogy and to Singled Out, Virginia Nicholson’s excellent biography of that generation of women destined to remain spinsters or build careers after their men were killed, or left mentally gone after the war. Among the Mad is a great idea for a mystery: fed up with the lack of attention given to former soldiers now that memories are healing over, someone is committing murder using the horrific chemicals and methods inflicted on them during the War.

While Winspear’s prose is more workmanlike than I’d ideally like and her characters don’t really leap off the page despite their interesting backstories, her story is efficient. Its focus on the forgotten soldiers of WW1 acts as a welcome counterpoint to the easy, lazy days the 1930s are usually painted as. There is also a bittersweet sideplot in which the wife of Maisie’s male assistant is sent to an asylum after the death of her young daughter, and suffers from what passed for mental health treatment. Luckily, a contact of Maisie’s is a senior physician at a more progressive hospital, and the wife is allowed to move there, but it’s a neat reminder that not everything was Mitfordian sunshine in the 1930s.

It’s a quick read, but one that will leave you thinking afterwards, not least because, in passing, Winspear drops some very interesting names I’d never heard of before: female policemen and a doctor who ran a women-only patrol of doctors in France during the war. Maddeningly, I left this book at my mum’s for her to read, so a bit of Googling is in order before I can remember their names. Not sure I’ll actively seek out Maisie Dodds books again – the storyline is good but there’s not much zing – but those names, definitely.

Related posts:

1. The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe (Shane’s book 30, 2009)
2. The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin (Shane’s book 18, 2010)

Too Big to Fail

Andrew Ross Sorkin
Allen Lane 2009, Paperback, 640 pages, £14.99

What’s most breathtaking about this book – and there are many such things – is the speed with which embattled CEOs go from being free market zealots to morally outraged supplicants with an expectation that they should be bailed out on the best possible terms by the taxpayer. Of course it’s no surprise that such morally compromised men should be hypocrites; that goes hand-in-hand with what they do. But that they would be prepared to argue for a doctrine that so opposes the logic of their entire working lives is pretty stunning.

Sorkin roughly chronicles the period of time that Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson served as Secretary of the Treasury, during which the Bush administration went from being as opposed as it is possible to be to any kind of market intervention – or, in other words a large part of the problem – to launching the largest federal bailout in the nation’s history. Prior to his appointment Paulson was, in the now familiar corporatist practice, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the most greedy, unrestrained financial firms on the planet. He was dogged by accusations of favouritism towards his former firm and hostility towards its rivals, including the suggestion that he allowed Lehman Brothers to fail in a way he never would have done had the weakest firm been Goldman. We’ll never really know if this was a motivation or not, but the government performed a near 180 degree change in policy between Lehman’s bankruptcy and the AIG bailout just days later.

What is, frankly, highly enjoyable is watching as the CEOs of the major institutions realise that their seat in the lifeboat isn’t guaranteed. For the first time in their careers, they briefly contemplate the consequences – the real, human consequences – of their actions and their immense greed. Better yet, is the savage logic of competitors being forced to cooperate by the regulators, as they are asked to pitch in to help save the system. As the chaos spreads, so potential benefactors become victims. Watching these men fear for their reputations and their offensive personal wealth, even if most of them end up holding on to at least the latter of these gives a wonderful sense of schadenfreude.

These are men who have, for years, been assured an obscene, immoral remuneration, playing an abstract game that has real consequences for real people, but who have never had to face even the indignity of flying first class on commercial airplanes. It’s company jets all the way with these guys. This, and a host of other luxuries that these offensively extravagant men enjoy, comprehensively gives the lie to the idea that these firms are run with shareholder value as the guiding principle of everything they do. They are in effect the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs imaginable (hardly a single player in this drama is a woman, and those are and have broken through the glass ceiling are regarded with jealousy and suspicion by their male colleagues, bosses and underlings).

Sorkin’s writing is straight out of the Bob Woodward inside story playbook, which means that it is obsessed with detail, sometimes at the expense of the overall narrative. Like so much of this kind of writing, it seeks to establish a unity of action as though it were a thriller, although this sometimes leads to some very clunky Tom Clancy-esque tropes, such as presenting the imagined thoughts of protagonists in italics rather than quotes. The text is littered with errors, some of them so egregious that it’s hard to believe that some of the pages were checked at all.

It need hardly be said that the bailout exposed free-market capitalism – especially the lightly regulated form that has emerged as the default model in the first world over the past couple of decades – is not sustainable without a government to back it up, or regulators to insist on behaviour that is conducive to the protection of the system. What’s worse for the free-market ideologues is that the market isn’t structured in a way that prevents it from destroying itself, something that is a founding principle of capitalism itself.

There’s much discussion of the technical term “moral hazard”, which broadly speaking is defined as an action taken by the government that convinces the market that there will be no penalty for increasing risk, but the problem is that the bailouts themselves are exactly such a hazard. One might even say that the idea of the bailout has to be inherent in free-market capitalism, and therefore that moral hazard is baked into the system.

A brave government would take a broad series of actions to regulate remuneration, forcibly reconfigure firms such that they could fail without damaging the system as a whole, and find ways to incentivise financial institutions to behave in a way that is consistent with the requirements of a just society. But we haven’t got one of those, and nor are we about to get one.

The system therefore remains basically as it was, prone to further convulsions, panics and bubbles. The least we can hope for is that a few of the greedy bastards get their comeuppance as a result.

Related posts:

1. Shop Girl Diaries by Emily Benet (Kat’s book 7, 2010)
2. White Noise by Don DeLillo (Shane’s book 11, 2010)

The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.

And ah, the developments. Sorry to be a nuisance, but I’ rather not go into what some of the developments in Sanghera’s family are, partly because they’re not mentioned anywhere on the cover or in the reviews. The book would clearly like you to find out for yourself.

I will say that, while the family history Sanghera discovers is startling and frequently unsettling, this is far from being a “reboot of the misery memoir” as one of the reviews would claim. In fact, this is probably the most honest depiction of family life I’ve ever read, balanced and genuine, with things left unsaid rather than unveiled in great chapter-long confrontations.

Sanghera deserves huge credit (well, he wrote the thing, it’s fairly inevitable) for writing engagingly without being tempted by “-ising” his copy. No sentimalising, no eulogising, but still very funny and sympathetic. He’s both stern and forgiving of his younger self (who comes across – bless the past – as a marginally less un-self aware version of Adrian Mole), who – blessed with opportunities and strong parenting is left completely unaware of anything unusual in the family until the faintly staggering age of 24, and doesn’t follow it up until 30. It’s very rare to read of a discovery that doesn’t result in immediate confrontation, and refreshing – as any fule kno, life doesn’t work that way all the time.

The book’s cover makes it sound half-way between wacky East Is East/Bend It Like Beckham awakening-cum-wacky 80s memoir. It’s partly that, but this isn’t yet another eye rolling memoir offering a childhood up on a plate for us to giggle over and dispose of afterwards. Sanghera’s book is something that we all need: a memoir that depicts life and all the knotty sub-plots and quiet revelations that come along the way honestly, wittily and as naturally as you’ll get without going through it yourself.

Related posts:

1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)
2. One Day by David Nicholls (Kat’s book 5, 2010
3. Jarhead by Anthony Swofford (Sara’s book 7, 2010)

Nobody Move

Denis Johnson
Picador 2009, Paperback, 208 pages, £11.99

The central character is Jimmy Luntz, a compulsive gambler in debt to a guy called Juarez. When Gambol, Juarez’s right-hand man, comes to collect, Luntz shoots him in the leg and goes on the run. He meets Anita Desilvera, framed by her husband and her boss for the theft of $2 million. While Anita and Jimmy plot to steal the money, Gambol and Juarez come to town hunting Jimmy.

The book is so pared down that it reads like a film script. Johnson limits his taut, spare prose mostly to dialogue. He’s got a knack for the kind of zinging speech that makes this genre work and he has great fun with a couple of set pieces, including a shotgun fight in the dark.

The characters are all fairly stereotypical and the plot plays out along the expected lines, though Johnson does leave a few loose ends. Though the story is set in present-day California, it could easily be the 1940s. Only the occasional appearance of a mobile phone gives the era away.

Nobody Move is pure homage; Johnson doesn’t do anything new here but he’s obviously enjoying himself and it’s hard to resist being carried along.

Related posts:

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)
2. Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason (Shane’s book 33, 2009)
3. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (Shane’s book 1, 2010)

Your Face Tomorrow

Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)
Chatto & Windus 2009, Hardcover, 560 pages, £18.99

This is by far the longest part of the work, and it has much more action than the other parts, although that’s not setting a terribly high bar, since very little happened at all in the first two parts. Marías is fond of the run-on sentence and at times his writing because almost Proustian, ambling as it does through multiple clauses before ending somewhere far removed from the sentence’s origin, and there is often page after page of parenthetical digression.

Many readers will find this habit difficult to take, especially since Marías is often not reporting events or speech of great import or profundity. But I find that the gradual accretion of detail, musings, asides, references and allusions starts to open up unexpected depths to the work. You could see what is immediately at the surface as rather pedestrian spy story, but what emerges from the style is a profound insight into the way people converse, think and act.

Marías can often spend page after page on something that seems fairly trivial. A good example of this is a huge digression that he embarks on within a few pages of the opening of the novel, much of which is taken up with an obsessive observation of a ladder in a colleague’s tights. By doing it this way, he mimics the way our minds flit between unconscious thought, private thought and public speech. Another idée fixe is a drop of blood the narrator found on the top step of an older friend’s staircase, a drop of blood that seemed ominous, and of which he doesn’t speak, which he cleaned up without further comment, although the rim of the blood droplet had dried and was particularly difficult to remove.

What’s remarkable is that Marías does this in a style that never approaches the difficulty of Joyce or Proust, say. The allusions are learned and wide-ranging, and the narrator’s musings are split between profound questions and every day thoughts that might occur to any one of his readers.

Marías is fascinated with language, and his narrator often compares a turn of phrase in English to its Spanish equivalent and vice versa, and it’s a remarkable feat by the translator Margaret Jull Costa that these sections make sense to the English reader. There are certain keywords that he obsesses over, none more than patria, the Spanish word for ‘fatherland’ that was hijacked by the fascists. It’s fascinating how a banal phrase like ‘my country’ uttered by an Englishman could mean something quite sinister to a Spaniard. (Interestingly, but unremarked by Marías, it was also appropriated by the Cuban communists for their slogan patria o muerte.)

About halfway through this volume, the action starts really picking up, with the narrator going back to his native Madrid for a couple of weeks. There’s an absolutely astonishing scene where he confronts his estranged wife’s new boyfriend, which in many ways is central to the entire project. Here, Marías’s technique is particularly effective, as a ten or fifteen minute period of real time is rendered as perhaps a hundred pages, while all the while we wonder what our narrator will do.

When I read the first part of the trilogy a few years ago I had my doubts about it, mainly because I found the disconnect between the literary technique and the rather banal events being described too great, but I think that was a mistake. I also found it rather humourless, but again that was mistaken; for example, there’s an amusing (and ironically hubristic) aside as the narrator tells us that the Godfather films were a masterwork (also a trilogy) that got better with each succeeding part.

This is not an easy book to read, but the effort required is not unreasonable and pays enormous dividends. Marías is a fascinating writer, and Your Face Tomorrow is one of the few modern books that fall outside the literary fiction template and break genuine new ground for the novel. It’s a series that I feel certain will be regarded as a masterpiece by future generations.

Related posts:

1. Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini (Ian’s book 5, 2010)
2. Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 24, 2009)
3. Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 27, 2009)

The Kindly Ones

Charlotte Mandell (Translator)
Chatto & Windus 2009, Hardcover, 992 pages, £20.00

Max Aue is a homosexual member of the SD, a committed Nazi and an active participant in the holocaust. He is present, Forrest Gump-like, at virtually every significant event of the war, from the massacre at Babi Yar to the battle of Stalingrad (which he is transferred into after the Germans’ encirclement is complete), to the fall of Berlin.

Along the way he engages in a series of bizarre sexual practices – one of which is raping his own sister, another where he literally fucks his entire house, which he follows up by sodomising himself with a tree while the SS turn up to arrest him. Oh, and he murders his parents. Then he tells us that the holocaust was perpetrated by people “just like you”. Alongside the main narrative of the unfolding horror of the war (which Aue does not himself find horrifying), there is also a badly-written detective story, with two gumshoes from the Kripo trying to find his parents’ murderer. The closing pages of the novel have him being decorated by Hitler in person, during which he punches the Führer in the face knocking out several of his teeth, before killing both of his police pursuers after escaping from custody. It’s beyond ridiculous.

Worse than that, it’s badly written. The tone is homogenous and boring, and the text is probably twice as long as it should be, while Littell’s regard for his own prose is out of all kilter with its quality – the publishers trailed the novel with a pompous little booklet of extracts, essays and a letter to translators from the author.

The reason the book has received so much attention is that it won both of the major French literary prizes as well as an overwhelmingly positive press there. Littell is American, but grew up in Europe and writes in French.

I had originally planned an enormous post picking the novel apart piece by piece – I finished reading it back in May – but I’ve since decided that it doesn’t deserve the attention. It’s a profoundly bad book. Avoid it at all costs.

Related posts:

1. The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (James’s book 29, 2009)
2. The Glass Room by Simon Mawer (James’s book 22, 2009)
3. Pink Pony, Catherine Carey (Kat’s book 3, 2010)

The Eitingons

Mary-Kay Wilmers
Faber and Faber 2009, Hardcover, 496 pages, £20.00

There are three major figures in Wilmers’ family tree whose stories are covered here, as well as a supporting cast of several more. The first is Motty Eitingon, a refugee from the Ukraine who somehow managed to build an enormous fur import business in New York. The second is Max Eitingon, who became a disciple of Freud, and the third and most interesting is Leonid Eitingon, who was a member of the KGB in its various guises (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, etc) from the revolution until the late 1950s.

Leonid pops up from time to time as a footnote in history books as the man who arranged the murder of Trotsky, for which he seemed to have earned Stalin’s undying thanks until the absurd Doctors’ Plot whipped up such an anti-semitic hysteria that even Stalin’s guarantee that ‘not even a hair on his head’ would be touched was worth anything.

Leonid was the ultimate ‘Checkist’, which is to say a man entirely convinced of the rightness of the Soviet system, and someone prepared to carry out the orders of his superiors in order to protect it from all enemies, internal and foreign. He does not seem to have understood or cared that many of these ‘enemies’ were figments of Stalin’s paranoid imagination. In the end he fell foul of the deadly political mascinations that followed Stalin’s death and then Beria’s denunciation and execution. He was seen as ‘Beria’s man’, and had to pay for it with years of incarceration, no matter how much he asked for his case to be reviewed.

Motty is interesting in a different way. He seems to have been a complete chancer, the type of businessman who plays all ends against the middle and is, mostly, only one or two steps ahead of his creditors and the financial authorities. Wilmers is fascinated to know whether Motty ever helped Leonid in any way. There seems to be some circumstantial evidence that he did, but no more than that. The rest of Motty’s story is taken up with his dealings with the Soviet fur industry, and the inevitable suspicion this brought down on him in the years before and after America’s alliance of convenience with the Soviets.

Max’s story is somewhat less exciting, since he seems to have been much less of a maverick than either Motty or Leonid, but it’s still very interesting. His wealth, thanks to the Eitingon fur millions, was used to support Freud’s work, and, once it ran out, Max became a respect psychoanalyst in his own right.

The Eitingons is one of the most enjoyable non-fiction books I’ve read this year. It’s a wonderfully humane, digressive and intelligent look at the history of the 20th century through the prism of one family’s history, and it’s written in a wonderful discursive, personal tone that puts it a million miles away from formal historical biography. I recommend it unreservedly.

No related posts.

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin
Viking 2009, Hardcover, 256 pages, £17.99

As always with Tóibín, the writing is impeccable, and there is a wonderful melancholy air hanging over the entire novel, a grim sadness which leads one to expect a story with more grief than it in fact contains. It’s fashionable to characterise Irish writing as ‘miserable’, and we are frequently pointed to modern examples such as Anne Enright’s The Gathering and Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture. Both of those books deserve a more considered response than that, and Tóibín’s deserves the same respect.

Brooklyn is the story of a young woman forced to emigrate to the United States because of the lack of opportunity in her native Ireland of the 1950s. Although gender barriers across Europe had taken an enormous hit thanks to the efforts of women during the just finished war, the benefits of greater equality had not found their way to southern Ireland. Eilis is expected to find a prosperous young man and marry him, even though the choice is poor, and the parochialism of the local men depressing.

Eilis heads for America under the protection of the church, and finds work there in a department store. There, she struggles with loneliness and homesickness. Just as she begins to find her feet, news from Ireland calls her home.

The tension in Brooklyn centres on Eilis’s decision once she gets back to Ireland. Will she stay and sink back into the old, and by her new lights old-fashioned, ways of a patriarchal society, or will she return to the land of the future? In many ways, this can be seen as a parallel for the choice that faced much of the world at the same time. Sink back into the past, dominated by an elite of men, or forge a path into the democratic, technology-dominated future?

The reason I found Brooklyn underwhelming is that it seems to promise rather more conflict and misery than it delivers, like a horror movie with no scares, just ominous music. This leads to a rather overwrought feeling to the writing, even if it is in other respects beautifully controlled. It’s not a bad novel, not by any means, but it is rather conventional in narrative structure, plot, characterisation and outcome, and I’ve come to expect more than that from Tóibín.

Related posts:

1. The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk (James’s book 28, 2009)
2. The Innocent by David Szalay (James’s book 31, 2009)
3. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (Shane’s book 10, 2010)