This Book Has No Plot

Over at The Dabbler I write a Row Z feature on cricket and America, largely inspired by Joesph O’Neill’s much-praised novel Netherland.

Gaw said he came to ‘despise’ Netherland. I wouldn’t go as far as ‘despise’ but did get frustrated with it. It was uneven in the sense that there were brilliant passages, but in their isolation they stood out as self-conscious literariness. There was also a sense, augmented by the blurb and cover, of murder-mystery tension which didn’t go anywhere, essentially because, it eventually turned out, there was no plot. I would probably have enjoyed the book more had I been reading it purely as a literary psychological novel – rather than as a thriller with literary pretensions – because then I wouldn’t have been waiting for the story to develop. They should put stickers on such books: “Warning: This book has no plot.”

Opening sentence of the week

Psychotherapy was arguably the most important innovation of the 20th century.

Alain de Botton (reviewing Couch Fiction by Philippa Perry).

Useful word, "arguably".

Compare and contrast

Two items from the Sunday Times:

There are many important people who don’t want to hear the good news, who see globalisation and uncontrolled trade as a threat to everything they hold dear. They include our national Eeyore, Prince Charles, and his landowner chums of the Soil Association, who say that what they call “sustainability” can only be achieved through self-sufficiency and a rejection of agricultural science. As Ridley observes, based on a whirlwind tour of every sort of society at every point in history, self-sufficiency is just a posh word for poverty: the two are inseparable. It is, of course, those furthest from starvation who find this fact hardest to appreciate.

Dominic Lawson reviews The Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

The ultimate solution, he says, is for us all to live less decadently — growing our own food and recycling instead of replacing goods: “People must drop their standard of living [so] the wealth can be spread about. There’s a long way to go.”

Actor Jeremy Irons launches his bid to be the green Michael Moore

Pavement Panto™ - rhyming the tongue cluck (The Leopard)

Came across a terrific piece of attempted Pavement Panto™ (remember that?) in, of all places, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s seminal work of Italian literature The Leopard:

Ignorant vulgarity exuded from his every pore; even so, the two listeners were astounded; Don Fabrizio needed all his self-control not to show surprise....Father Pirrone did let his tongue cluck on his palate; then, annoyed at having shown his own amazement, he tried to rhyme the improvident sound by making his chair and shoes squeak and by crackling the leaves of his breviary but failed completely; the impression remained.

Eating animals

Jonathan Safran Foer has written an anti-meat book called Eating Animals.

Personally I find meat delicious and lack the will and/or moral fibre to sacrifice it and I don’t want to read Foer’s book because it will probably increase my feelings of guilt. I’m not proud of this.

Mrs Brit is a veggie and I’ve had to sit patiently with her through enough meals while some Clarkson-wannabe bore wags his forkful of steak and harangues her with tales of primitive man’s mammoth-hunting etc to know all the pro-meat arguments inside out. (If you are one of those people who feels the need to lecture vegetarian ladies you’ve just met, I urge you to desist. They will neither be convinced nor secretly thrilled and enraptured by your roguish forthrightness.) Anyway, it is of course perfectly possible to be vegetarian and healthy (how many obese veggies do you know?) and yes being able to give up meat is a luxury but then so is voting and not having to steal things.

Many of the anti-meat arguments are nonsense too, mind. Militant vegetarians - of which Mrs B is most certainly not one - often demand that meat-eaters should be prepared to slaughter their own animals. This makes no more sense than demanding that people who drive cars or use toilets should be prepared to fix their own engines or do their own plumbing.

On the other hand I find that I’m ever more conscious or guilty about free rangery and suchlike, and it seems clear that this is the direction the western world is going: until we perfect lab meat we’ll increasingly come to despise factory farming.

Moral values change and just as we feel sick at the way our forebears treated penniless orphans or petty criminals or ethnic minorities, so our descendants will be appalled by our battery chickens and many, many other things which we take for granted. We cannot even guess which of our routine behaviours will be the taboos of the future.

In stark contrast

In the wake of an Amis come Hitchenses. Both Hitchens boys are busy doing the rounds (are they ever not?). Chris is promoting a memoir and Peter has a God book attacking his own brother’s anti-theism. Oddly, or possibly not, I’m with Peter on this one, despite my own deficiency in Faith.

Anyway, you can read an extract from Peter’s new book in the Daily Mail here. One line in particular amused me:

Christopher and I are separate people who, like many siblings, have lived entirely different lives since our childhood.

Oh, absolutely. Whereas Christopher has made a living based on provocative columns, books and public speaking from an idiosyncratic but broadly left-wing position, Peter has made a living based on provocative columns, books and public speaking from an idiosyncratic but broadly right-wing position. Entirely different.

This reminds of me of an excellent gag by, funnily enough, Martin Amis in (I think, but can’t check as the book is somewhere in the attic) Success, which goes something like: Gregory was throwing up in the upstairs bathroom. Terry, in stark contrast, was throwing up in the downstairs bathroom.

This gag has been in my head for years and I keep meaning but forgetting to steal the format. However, I hereby pledge that I will get round to nicking it soon – any reader who spots the usage and points it out in the comments will receive a prize of some sort.

Too much prose

It seems that some light can be shed on the Tiger Woods fiasco by an interview he gave to GQ back in 1997. An article by Charles P Pierce portrayed Woods as a vulgar and libidinous frat boy, who cusses freely and makes dubious jokes about well-endowed black men. The story goes that after this interview a Tiger Team of PR goons seized control of his image to ensure that he would henceforth be indistinguishable from the character in his Playstation game, and so he was until the whole phoney structure caved in last year.

You can read the piece by Charles P Pierce here. Or at least you can try, and if you manage to get to the end you deserve some sort of prize, because Pierce must be one of the most mannered hacks in print. The prose is, for me, literally unreadable. The hammered repetition of “Is it blasphemy? Is it?” reminded me of something which I eventually remembered to be a Steve Coogan bit on The Day Today (see below) and overall it recalls the ghastly self-consciousness of Chuck Palahniuk (‘Annoying’ isn’t the right word for his book Choke, but it’s the first word that comes to mind) or even worse, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, one of the few books I’ve been tempted to throw across the room before the end of the first chapter.

Over at Ragbag Gaw links to some authorly tips. I particularly like this pair from Elmore Leonard:

- Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

- Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

These are fine rules and should only be broken for purposes of irony or bathos (eg. “If you do that I’ll break every bone in your body, rip your head and limbs off, bury the body parts and dance on the grave,” he explained helpfully).

It's difficult not to write too much prose. Re-writing largely consists of deleting. God knows what Charles P Pierce’s first drafts look like but he should read more Jane Austen and Michael Wharton. Well, everyone should.

Welcome to North Korea

From The Sunday Times review of Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.

Children don’t celebrate their own birthdays, only those of the two Kims. At school they sing songs about the “American bastards”. “With guns that I make with my own hands, I will shoot them Bang Bang Bang.”

In the 1990s, the country was struck by famine. The government started preaching, Let’s eat only two meals a day!, and state news reported a man whose stomach had burst open from eating too much rice. When food ran short, the regime didn’t try to produce more. It simply told bigger lies.....

People began picking kernels of ­undigested corn out of the excrement of farm animals. By 1995, almost all the frogs in the country had been eaten. The government announced it was stockpiling food for the poor, starving South Koreans in readiness for imminent unification. Children died first, of dysentery, pneumonia or typhoid, and then the fittest and most muscular died — they have faster metabolisms and burn more calories. The country received $2.4 billion in food aid, much of it from the “American bastards”, but perhaps 2m starved to death.



Yes yes, but if we could just give Communism a proper chance…

Wild Swans

Nige tells of some extraordinary finds in an Oxfam bookshop, including a book about certified morons.

But here's one that's been bugging me for years. Have you ever been into a charity shop which didn't have on display at least one copy of Wild Swans by Jung Chang?

Why John Gray is not a sceptic

The Yard calls John Gray a ‘great sceptic’ and Jason Cowley in The Observer describes Gray as “Britain's most sceptical thinker”. Neither of these descriptions is accurate – the latter I can immediately disprove because in this very post I will demonstrate that there is at least one more sceptical British thinker than Gray, namely me.

Peasants and other rural folk often stop me on the lanes hereabouts, sometimes to impugn me and sometimes to ask: “Brit, what in your opinion is the most common error in general philosophical musings?” To which I reply: “Conflating the ability to doubt something with having a reason to believe that that something is false.” A common example amongst Philosophy undergrads is solipsistic idealism. The ability to doubt that the world I perceive is objectively real is not by itself a reason to believe that I am plugged into the Matrix being fed a hallucination of the objective world.

In Straw Dogs John Gray makes errors of this kind frequently. He is very sceptical about commonly accepted ideas but he only applies this scepticism to his enemy, ie. progressive liberal humanism. He makes many claims of his own, often about the distant future, to which he applies no such scepticism. In this sense he is a mystic.

There are two cornerstone arguments in Straw Dogs. The first is that western Enlightenment-based liberal progressivism equates to a utopianism as deluded and doomed to failure as other utopian projects such as Marxism and Nazism, because no matter how much technology and living standards might evolve, mankind cannot improve morally. (Indeed, Gray argues that the two twentieth century evils are the direct offspring of the Enlightenment – a somewhat cantankerous claim, simplistically expressed, which ignores the fact that western liberal systems rejected and destroyed both. In Britain Nazism was always a joke and in America communism was anathema),

Being anti-utopian and disbelieving in the perfectibility of mankind are basics of conservative thought – in this sense Gray is only saying what, for example, many of the commenters here say all the time: that Man is Fallen. I agree. Where Gray is unusual is in his insistence that perfectibilism explains all forms of liberal progressivism, ie. that any technological or social ‘improvements’ are driven by the hope of a perfect future. This looks like a sceptical claim but in fact it is merely a cynical claim. Cynicism is as much opposed to true scepticism as is wide-eyed optimism. At no point in Straw Dogs does Gray address the possibility that perfectibilism may be only one of many motives to explain the history of western ‘progressivism’, and sometimes not a motive at all. If I have a toothache I go to the dentist to get it fixed because I wish to remove the pain. I do not go with the idea of one day having a set of perfect American-style choppers. Some part of me may indeed wish to have such a perfect set and from an outside perspective the fix may look like a step on the road to it, but it was not my prime motive. You can ‘progress’ away from something as well as towards something. Gray does not acknowledge that amelioration is not the same as perfectibilism, but this is the difference between the medical researcher who aims to alleviate a particular form of human suffering, and the transhuman who wants a world of medically immortal superhumans. The same applies to ethics: the desire to correct particular behaviour which is perceived as immoral is not the same as the belief that we will one day live in a wholly moral world.

There have been plenty of reactionary thinkers with similarly cynical views of progressivism and bleak views about mankind’s future prospects. (I've just read Michael Wharton's excellent The Missing Will for one example). John Gray’s USP is an argument from Darwinism (this is the second key argument in Straw Dogs). Gray claims that virtually everybody has failed to understand Darwin’s lesson that man is just another animal. For Gray it makes no more sense to say that man can control his destiny – by which he really means achieve genuine moral progress – than it does to claim that a cow or a wolf can do likewise.

Here Gray greatly overinterprets Darwinism's predictive power. Darwinism can provide an explanation of the physical processes by which the human brain evolved. It is silent on what happens thereafter, socially and ethically. The human genome has not altered for tens of thousands of years, perhaps 100,000 years. But human social and ethical structures have changed many times, for better or worse, so Darwinism is just not a very useful tool for making vast societal claims, whether explanatory or predictive. It may be that Gray is right even in his bleakest predictions, but he is making unsceptical, highly debatable, often quasi-mystical claims. In this sense he is as much a Darwinian mystic as the daftest evolutionary psychologists.

Martin Amis, pauses, gender

Jon Hotten notes the medialand rumblings that foretell the release of a new Martin Amis novel (The Pregnant Widow - great title) and observes that Mart is “a member of the last generation capable of talking in fully-formed sentences. There are no, 'I was like, you know...'s” .

This is true, though I suspect that Amis manages this largely by leaving the spaces between clauses - which other interviewees would fill with “you know”s or “ummm”s or other tics- as silent pauses. This is a good knack to have since it gives the impression of gravitas, but then talking in fully formed sentences is very, very difficult and even pausing requires self-discipline and nerve.

I’ve never quite worked out how smart Mart is. Certainly he views himself as a Thinker but he often seems to be carried well out of his intellectual depth on the sails of his own verbosity, eg. recently on Muslims.

(While writing this I’ve just remembered that in the first incarnation of the blog I attempted a homage to the Martin Amis style with this piece on American teeth. Reading back, it’s not quite as bad as I thought it might be but three years ago does seem like another lifetime, proving once again that blogtime flies even faster than real time).

But I greatly admire Amis’s gift for getting to the nub of a thing, for expressing a viewpoint, often controversial, in a single, memorable, highly convincing phrase. There was a striking example in his Sunday Times interview this week, especially given the release of another high-profile book in which Natasha Walter u-turns in despair at the fate of feminism.

Note the Amis Pause before the (emboldened) profundity:

“I know women now full of regret at just not worrying about [having babies] until it really was too late,” he says. “Three or four friends, who would have been very good mothers, but…” He pauses. “The sex revolution wasn’t a bad thing. In fact it was a cornucopia of opportunity. But it is a massive project to rethink an entire gender, and behaving like men was the only model women had. It was never in their interests to be like that. The sex wasn’t in their nature.”

On Chesil Beach

Rattled through Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach over the weekend. Typical McEwan in that it is about the life-defining consequences of moments that seem both arbitrary and unavoidable; in this case, a row between newlyweds after their excruciatingly bodged attempt at consummation. There are some stylistic oddities. The forensic real-time descriptions of Edward and Florence’s tragicomic attempts at dinner and sex are interrupted by awkward authorial remarks along the lines of “This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine” (it’s set in 1962, ie. the year before sexual intercourse began). These interjections are justified at the close of the book by an alarmingly brusque account of the lives of the protagonists over the next four decades – bringing us up to the 'all-knowing' present – but on first read they are a bit jarring. I could also have done without the flashback half-hints at incestuous abuse suffered by the juvenile Florence, offering an unnecessary Freudian explanation for her physical horror of sex.

But I quibble – mostly it is masterly. I loved the glimpses of Edward’s mother, left “brain-damaged” by a hit-and-run railway carriage door incident. The critical row on the beach is superbly done: two people who really don’t want to hurt each other striking ever more unforgivable blows purely because each insult seems to follow, with unavoidable logic, from the last. And in fact I also liked the brevity of the what-happened-next coda. Possibly we need fewer novels and more novellas from our big guns. In a normal-sized novel we’d have had chapters in which Florence and Edward meet again in later life, but the rapidity with which McEwan wraps up his story gives a much more powerful shock.

Which brings me at last to the point of this post. The intention of On Chesil Beach is, I assume, to tap into the universal horror of regret: those moments of opportunities blown and wounds unnecessarily inflicted which, while by no means defining us, can surprise us by lurching into our consciousness at 3am. If I had only been braver or smarter at that one instant, my whole life might have turned out so much better, and I only have one life, aaargh!

But for me, the central conceit only works because neither Edward nor Florence subsequently have children in their separate lives. Being a recent father I’m either biased towards thinking this or possibly just attuned to noticing its truth. Offspring are regret-killers (at least, of everything occuring before their appearance), even the nasty little buggers. If Edward had had children in one of his later relationships the structure of this novella would collapse, since upon contemplating his sprogs his overriding sentiment would most likely be: “Thank goodness we had that row on Chesil Beach, otherwise you would never have come into existence”, thus turning the thing on its head. In this respect, the lasting sensation for most readers will be pity for the characters rather than introspective horror, and I don’t know if that was McEwan’s purpose.

Non-endings 2

Over here, Jon Hotten responds to the Non-endings post about his book The Years of the Locust. It is reasonable to say that Tim Anderson got life without parole because the Judge insisted on keeping his narrative within narrow limits for the purposes of the trial. When you're aware of the wider story, this seems terribly harsh. But who is to say that the Judge was wrong? Stretching the narrative would have been arbitrary too - you could, after all, start the story with Rick Parker's great-great-grandparents if you wanted.

But Anderson is in a real prison. Jon and I agreed that the arbitrary nature of narratives is a diverting philosophical game... unless the length of your prison term depends on it.

Non-endings

As a boy I was very taken with the cliff-hanger ending of The Italian Job. The lack of a resolution seemed dangerous and radical, breaking the most basic conventions of story-telling. I remember quizzing my father about it at what must have been pretty irritating length. Since then I’ve often found ‘unsatisfactory’ endings (eg. most Cohen Brothers movies) more satisfying than ‘satisfactory’ ones. This might be an unusual proclivity but then again plenty of children who end their horror stories with “And it was all a dream” then like to add the undermining coda “Or was it?”

The Years of the Locust is a punchy true account of murder and corruption in heavyweight boxing’s sordid under- and indeed over-belly. It is by writer, multi-talented blogger and fellow Steve Bruce fan Jon Hotten. I heartily recommend that you purchase it forthwith – it has many fine qualities (there’s an extraordinary chapter called Noir Boxers which rips through a great tapestry of corruption and might well put you off boxing for life) and it has stayed with me even though I read it before Christmas, ie. in another lifetime. But for me it was especially striking for its perfectly inconclusive conclusion.

Journeyman boxer Tim Anderson shoots the odious promoter Rick Parker to death, confesses immediately, is found guilty by a jury and is sentenced to life without parole. By the end of the story it is possible to say, confidently and justifiably, that Tim did commit premeditated murder, and also that he didn’t; and that he deserved to be given life without parole and also that he didn’t. We are sympathetic to the killer but, bravely and rightly, Hotten refuses to turn the book into a “Free Tim Anderson” soapbox lecture. The key passage comes after Anderson is found guilty by a jury which subsequently objected to the harshness of his sentence. The trial of Tim Anderson had been a simple one. It came down to this: two men walked into a room. One man walked out. All of it was true. None of it was true.

Endings and narratives are constructions. It’s not that all narratives are equally valid (or invalid) and therefore useless. It’s not even that history is just one damn thing after another. The problem lies with the causal chains upon which narratives depend. Virtually everything that happens has multiple causes, the various degrees of importance of which are impossible for humans to determine with any objective certainty, particularly when considering decisions and states of mind. How do you explain the moment before an action? (Anderson shot Parker on the spur of the moment, and he also shot Parker because he had built up years of justifiable resentment. Somebody had to shoot Parker and Anderson just happened to be the man unfortunate enough to be in the position to do it. He didn't have to do it, but then again he had no choice. Part of Anderson planned to shoot Parker, but Anderson was the kind of person who could never plan to murder someone. But the law can't allow people to be murdered just because they seem to really deserve it, so the guilty verdict was the right one.)

Because of the multiple causes, the causal chain is incomprehensibly complex - a web, in fact, not a chain. Futhermore, the beginnings and ends of the chains are arbitrarily selected by the narrator and, as with climate change graphs, contracting or expanding the scope radically alters the appearance of the trend. Further furthermore, a range of quite different descriptions of the same thing can all be objectively true at the same time (for example, a piece of music could be described as a series of transcribed notes, or wave frequencies, or cultural influences, or aesthetic qualities) and people often slip between different kinds of description of things in their causal chain. But then again, narratives are useful, important and morally necessary, except when they are counterproductive, trivial and morally abhorrent.

England Have My Bones

TH White, author of the strange and indelible Arthurian sequence The Once and Future King, is also the author of a strange and indelible memoir called England Have My Bones. You can often find it in secondhand bookshops; if you see it, do pick it up.

It is ostensibly a diary of a year of country living in the 1930s, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a book in which so much is unsaid. White fishes, hunts, shoots ducks, learns to fly a small aeroplane and keeps snakes as pets. He does these things one at a time and obsessively, being the sort of person who needs to be the best at everything he tries. He sets arbitrary and very difficult goals because he wants the punishment.

White writes beautifully, a genuine master of prose so much in control that he can break the rules. He has a knack of composing perfectly-balanced sentences from those middling words which you think you know but would want to double-check in a dictionary if tested. This makes for a somewhat disorienting reading experience. For example:

The primaries of the plover buckled to the wind on the turn, like the tawse of a brogue. The pine clumps on the moors had dead trees in them, like the badger bristles on a tramp’s old chin. Then it began to rain. It was a Homeric east-winderly rain, as repeatedly described by the Southcotes.

He appears to be both vain and deeply self-loathing. This may be grounded in an unfulfilled homosexuality: one biographer described him as “a homosexual and a sadomasochist”, though his friend David Higham said: "Tim was no homosexual, though I think at one time he had feared he was...and in his ethos fear would have been the word." White is terrified of people and relationships and humiliation, but not of death. This becomes apparent in the flying section of the book and in an extraordinary ending in which he suffers a serious car crash. Warner said, "Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race.” In other diaries (England Have My Bones contains nothing so direct) White himself made the Morrissey-ish statement: "it has been my hideous fate to be born with an infinite capacity for love and joy with no hope of using them."

The odd thing is that all this comes through in what are, essentially, laboriously detailed descriptions of his hobbies. The effect is somewhat akin to finding a profound and melancholy meditation on the human condition in an airfix instruction booklet.

Book Review: "Sweeper!" by Steve Bruce

Following a personal recommendation by The Old Batsman, I sought out a copy of Sweeper!, a slim, self-published thriller by the ex-Manchester United footballer and current manager of Sunderland, Steve Bruce.

Penned during the 1999/2000 season, while Steve Bruce was manager of Huddersfield Town FC, the protagonist of Sweeper! is one Steve Barnes, manager of the fictional Leddersfield Town FC.

From that information alone you will, I’m sure, already have an inkling about this novel. And you’d be right: it is one of the great postmodern, deconstructionist works in the British literary canon.

From the very first page, Bruce/Barnes questions the reader’s preconceptions about identity, as club owner “Sir Lawrence Brook” becomes “Sir Laurence Brook” within the space of two sentences. Snide thoughts that this might be a typo due to the lack of a proofreader/editor are quickly dismissed, as the sheer quantity of fundamental spelling inconsistencies can leave the reader in no doubt that they are perfectly deliberate. Not least, Leddersfield Town itself regularly transmogrifies into Leddersford Town. And back again.

Indeed, look carefully and you’ll see that Bruce’s challenging explorations of identity are prefigured by the specially-commissioned cover art, in which we see the real Bruce standing alongside his assistant John Deehan, onto whose image a (deliberately) crude moustache and hairstyle have been photoshopped. Thus, while Bruce/Barnes remains ‘real’, Deehan has been ‘fictionalised’ (in the book he is known as ‘Jock Durham’. Mostly.). But what is ‘real’? Again and again, Bruce/Barnes forces us to confront this question; and again and again, he denies us a clearcut answer.

Bruce’s control of plot and pacing is a masterful high wire act as he treads a delicate line between the direct and the elusive. Delivered in brutally minimalist, matter-of-fact prose (His office was comfortable. There was a computer on the desk.) which also serves as a witty pastiche of the Dan Brown school of writing, the story of a football manager caught up in the affairs of Israeli Nazi-hunters and fanatical kidnappers ought to be easy to follow, yet somehow Bruce contrives to baffle and confuse. By the plot’s ‘conclusion’ the reader will be none the wiser as to the motives of any of the main characters, nor indeed what any of them actually did, nor who they were, nor the significance of any of it to the subplot about Bruce trying a five-three-two sweeper formation for the match against ‘Burnwick’.

As one of the country’s most accomplished defenders in the early 1990s, Steve Bruce was expert at breaking up opposition attacks. He transfers these skills brilliantly to the page, wrongfooting the complacent reader at every turn. We are never allowed to settle as Bruce/Barnes frequently halts the narrative flow with lengthy asides about the technical specifications of his Jaguar motorcar, or some football grounds he has known, or his wife’s predilection for shopping. My favourite example, as we wait eagerly for Bruce to embark on a dangerous mission, is this pensée about breakfast:

I prepared and ate breakfast. My mother always impressed on me as a lad the importance of a good breakfast. I don’t go the full Monty: I can manage without a pork chop and black pudding. But I like cereals, followed by bacon and eggs. And toast with marmalade. All washed down with tea. That’s the kind of breakfast a man such as me needs.

Bathetic statements of the mundane, stark in their beauty, are sprinkled through the text like precious jewels woven into a tapestry: Then my mobile telephone rang. I did not curse the interruption. A mobile phone is a necessary instrument of modern business. And better still: It is a building more than one hundred years old. Built in the Italian style, someone told me. I wouldn’t have known. Architecture, like much else, is a closed book to me.

I cannot have been the only reader or reviewer to have found that phrase 'like much else' profoundly moving.

But these apparent non-sequiturs are of course the whole point: the ghastly, nauseous reality of the ‘ordinary’ – Bruce has been reading his existentialists! Sartre, Kafka, Joyce, Henry Miller: these are Bruce’s literary heroes and mentors. Yet by absorbing the approach of the modernist and postmodernist writers and taking it into new, common-man territory – that of Nationwide First Division football management circa 1999 – Bruce/Barnes democratises these challenging ideas like no other professional sportsman-turned-self-published novelist based in the north east of England of the last thirty years. The following extract, in which Bruce/Barnes faces the prospect of being shot, succinctly encapsulates the ethos:

The gun was level with my belly. So this was what it was like to die. There was no doubt I was going to die. And not even in Newcastle. Not even Premier League. In Halifax, of all places, with a club in the third division.

Thus Sweeper! confronts the reader with as chilling a meditation on mortality as you’ll find. Think of England rating: Five thumbs up!