On this side of the Channel, French thinkers sometimes have a reputation for bamboozling obscurity. In certain cases that might be justified; in others, not at all. Soon the English edition of a short, sulphurous polemic by the academic Marc Perelman will appear from Verso Books. It's called Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, and it does exactly what it says on the boîte.
Many readers here will, I suspect, warm to Perelman in his
indictment of the money-crazed, power-hungry, people-eating
monstrosity of globalised sport as a curse on humanity. With the
London Olympics looming, and its tyrannous lockdown on the city
dictated by the grotesque and over-mighty shadow-state of the
International Olympic Committee, sport's bitterest enemies have
their case made for them in every security-driven stunt.
And yet ... this "barbaric" system, at his wealthiest levels,
depends for its renewal as a mass spectacle not on barbarians but
on gifted young men and women whose own perspective on their
bizarre lives could reveal so much about the way our world now
works. Good novelists have begun to notice – for example – that
up-and-coming soccer stars suddenly transported to a seething
metropolis can serve as witnesses to our media-framed urban
modernity. In A Week In December, Sebastian Faulks had his Polish
striker turn a quizzical eye on London. For John Lanchester in
Capital, a Senegalese teen prodigy and his father did the job. Over
in Madrid, Learning To Lose by the Spanish novelist David Trueba
features a naïve Argentinian star import, adrift in a place that
defies easy understanding.
Reading these novels, I did sometimes wish for a real-life
counterpart to these wide-eyed but keen-witted observers of a
billionaires' circus sustained by the – expensively exploited -
dreams of millions of fans. Needless to say, most football
"autobiographies", ghosted and airbrushed to the point of utter
nullity, do little more than feed the PR machines of owners,
sponsors and the media. So when a memoir by a football star packed
with frankness, insight and self-knowledge appears, even sporting
sceptics might want to raise a cheer.
To say that Louis Saha's Thinking Inside The Box (Vision Sports
Publishing) is not your average kick'n'tell apologia would do it,
and him, scant justice. Saha eschewed the services of a ghost, and
is now published in English thanks to a flavourful, idiomatic
translation by Georgia de Chamberet.
He reflects on his upbringing in the poor Paris banlieue, on
football in France and England, and on its wider role as big
business and as popular obsession. The book shines with candour,
modesty and intelligence. A player who knows that "the world of
football spins on an axis of money and sex" both outlines the
temptations of "barbarism" and shows how strong roots, sturdy
values and a certain ironic detachment can safeguard humanity.
It helps, I think, that Saha – now at Tottenham after spells at
FC Metz, Newcastle, Fulham Manchester United and Everton – never
quite rose to the first rank of stardom. Injury-prone, not
consistent enough, he's something of a nearly man, as dramatised in
a wrenching chapter about his anguish when stranded on the bench
during United's 2008 Champions League final in Moscow against
Chelsea: "a living nightmare". As Saha puts it, he could never
"reproduce the magic of Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi".
Moreover, as a potential celebrity, "I am not bankable or eccentric
enough on the pitch to get caught in a paparazzi frenzy".
This slight marginality makes him the perfect observer, whether
of media intrusion, racism and the long fight against it, or
homophobia in football – hardly a staple topic of strikers'
memoirs. Rather than hog the limelight, he also quotes a squad of
colleagues, from Patrice Evra and Phil Neville to William Gallas;
Zinédine Zidane has especially sage advice for "Petit Louis". And
he gives his wife, Aurélie Saha-Gillet, a rather moving chapter of
her own on survival as a tabloid-branded "WAG". Global sport may
have turned barbaric. But its top performers, as Saha's deeply
civilised book shows, need not succumb to this dehumanising force.
How can international sport ensure that, when the whistle blows on
playing days, people like him run the show rather than the
reptilian apparatchiks of Fifa and the IOC?
Nordic noir with a British passport
Travel far enough north in the UK and you reach the rugged
settings for our home-grown "Scandinavian" crime fiction. Later
this year, one of the four Shetland-set mysteries by Ann Cleeves
will migrate to the TV screen with BBC Scotland's two-part
adaptation of Red Bones. Cleeves, pictured, already commands the
Sunday-night screen with her Northumbrian cop DI Vera Stanhope.
Given the appeal of her Shetland novels, might we see a mini-boom
in Nordic noir with a British passport? Wannabe bestsellers and
location scouts may be scouring the islands of Orkney even now. But
then, according to one reading of history, the Scottish annexation
of 1468 had no validity and Orkney still belongs to Norway.
Could Man's fall kill the Booker?
The hedge-fund giant Man Group reshuffled its management on
Tuesday, the latest anxious measure during a grim spell that has
seen shares in the "alternative investment" firm drop by almost
two-thirds and takeover rumours swirl around the City. Shares have
plunged to their lowest valuations in more than a decade and, in
the first quarter of 2012, investors removed a cool billion dollars
– net – from the company.
The reason I'm telling you this rather than my financial pages
colleagues is, of course, that without Man funding we would have no
annual Man Booker Prize, no biennial Man Booker International Prize
– and nor would the increasingly influential Man Asian Literary
Prize exist either.
At last year's Booker, Man announced its commitment to another
decade of literary sponsorship. What would happen to that pledge
should new owners take command? I suspect that nurturing
Commonwealth and Asian fiction might come pretty low on the list of
priorities for the sort of US asset manager likely to show interest
in acquiring the group.
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