Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds & John Eidinow

Back-biting, infighting and paranoia: Matthew J Reisz uncovers the drama behind a tournament that came close to collapse

When Bobby Fischer came face to face with Boris Spassky in 1972, write David Edmonds and John Eidinow, many Westerners saw him as "a lone American star challenging the long Soviet grip on the world title". The board became "a Cold War arena where the champion of the free world fought for democracy against the apparatchiks of the Soviet socialist machine. Here was the High Noon of chess, coming to you from a concrete auditorium in Iceland."

The media delighted in this simplistic morality play. The true story, as this gripping book reveals, was just as dramatic but far less black and white. Far from conforming to national stereotypes, the players "had in common their sheer unsuitability to represent their countries' political systems. Spassky was not a [Soviet] patriot - and he made no secret of it. Fischer's idiosyncratic and asocial behaviour marked him as un-American for many of his compatriots."

Fischer was famously unhousetrained, the kind of man, wrote one journalist, who "was likely to greet even an old friend as if he were expecting a subpoena". His moroseness and diva-like demands about noise levels, lighting, chairs, film rights and much else almost scuppered the championship several times. He has since sunk into paranoia, Christian sectarianism and an obsession with a particular move in a game he played decades ago. Now deeply anti-American, he once adopted a Japanese e-mail address starting "us_is_shit".

Some of this is just personal pathology. Edmonds and Eidinow quote a silly piece of psychobabble where an unusual but powerful knight move is interpreted as a sign of Fischer's "apprehension about females". But it is a pity they are so little interested in psychology. Since Bobby's mother - like his biological father, as the authors' trawl through FBI files discovered - was both Jewish and a committed communist, there was surely something more than "poignant irony" in Bobby's red-bashing and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

But were some of Fischer's histrionics a deliberate tactic? Not long before the match, Richard Nixon explained his Madman Theory: the best way to get the North Vietnamese to negotiate was to convince them that he, the man with his finger on the nuclear button, was so obsessed with communism that he would do anything to stop the war. Fischer had acquired a similarly irrational reputation for "inflicting financial and career damage on himself on failing to win concessions". This put him in a very strong negotiating position with the Icelanders who, once they had decided to host the match, had too much money and prestige invested even to consider a cancellation.

Edmonds and Eidinow make good use of research in Iceland, but the real revelations come from their insight into the Soviet camp. The press saw Spassky as a "benign bureaucrat", part of a "Soviet chess machine" notable for its "ruthless efficiency... a culture and political system that permitted no dissent or internal squabbling". All this proves hopelessly inaccurate. The system was so suspicious and inefficient that Spassky had to seek permission to buy and have translated foreign chess journals in order to carry out the most basic preparation. He was in no way a model Soviet citizen but a traditional "Russian patriot, the inheritor of Russian Orthodox religious culture".

He understandably admired Fischer and was looking forward to "a feast of chess". Yet, as the American delayed yet again his arrival in Reykjavik or made yet another unreasonable demand, the Party bosses in Moscow wanted the humiliated Spassky to come home. As defeat loomed, they debated every possible means of stiffening his resolve. The monolithic "Soviet chess machine" was in reality torn apart by back-biting and infighting.

Just over half this book gives a compelling day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, chronicle of the hurdles that had to be surmounted before Fischer and Spassky finally met, on 7 July 1972, to draw lots for white in the first game. One of the Fischer camp describes their man as looking "every inch the arrogant superstar" while Spassky seemed "like a guy who had asked for an autograph and been told to buzz off".

Then came the first game, which looked dead-drawn until Fischer made a mistake which would have disgraced a "rabbit" in a local chess club. He forfeited the second game by failing to turn up, so the match proper started with him two-nil down. He had smashed his way to the right to challenge Spassky with an unprecedented sequence of 19 successive wins (in most top-class matches, there are at least as many draws as outright victories). Now he grabbed the world title with a performance almost as impressive.

Chess isn't, of course, about anything other than itself. Edmonds and Eidinow tell the moving story of grandmaster Miguel Najdorf, who happened to be playing in Argentina when the Nazis invaded his native Poland. He therefore took up the extraordinary challenge of playing a record-breaking 40 opponents simultaneously and "blindfold" (ie retaining all the separate positions in his head). This was not only a stupendous mental feat but a deliberate attempt to get into the papers so his family would know he was safe.

Most high-grade chess games have no such wider purpose, but they can still give intense pleasure to enthusiasts. In the words of a leading music critic: "If chess were as popular as music, if as many people responded to its subtleties and nuances, the masterpieces of Steinitz, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinik and Fischer would not be held far below the masterpieces of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms."

Despite quoting this, Edmonds and Eidinow seem tone-deaf to the beauty of chess and fall back on limp phrases like "Suddenly Fischer's inactive troops sprung to attention. Each major piece was brought into the action with exquisite timing, arriving neither too early nor too late." (Imagine one of Beckham's goals described in such terms to get an idea of just how vague and inept this is.) Yet there are many other books which analyse the games in detail. As an account of the backstage gambits and counter-gambits, this one is surely definitive.