Guy Stagg
A Competition Without Rules
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Godwin, Joseph O’Neill, Fourth Estate, 2024, pp.304, £16.99
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A Wall Street banker crosses Manhattan in the middle of winter. ‘The route, unfamiliar to me, passed through the old Tin Pan Alley quarter, blocks now given over to wholesalers and street vendors and freight forwarders and import-exporters – Undefeated Wear Corp, Sportique, Da Jump Off, signs proclaimed – dealing in stuffed toys, caps, novelties, human hair, two-dollar belts, one-dollar neckties, silver, perfumes, leather goods, rhinestones, streetwear, watches. Arabs, West Africans, African Americans hung out on the sidewalks, among goods trucks, dollies, pushcarts, food carts, heaped trash, boxes and boxes of merchandise. I might have been in a cold Senegal.’ Traditionally, the flaneur is an impotent figure, unable to enter the places he explores. However, in this case the banker recognises one of the signs decorating an office building – CHUCK CRICKET INC – and steps inside from the cold.
The novel is Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and the narrator is a Dutchman named Hans van den Broek. He’s living at the Chelsea Hotel in the wake of 9/11, after his wife has left him and taken their son back to London. Looking to fill his weekends, Hans begins to play cricket with New York’s Caribbean and South Asian communities. He soon discovers that, in the overlooked neighbourhoods of the world’s most international city, men from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the West Indies gather through the summer months to take part in this least American of games. Sport not only gives the narrator access to these communities – travelling from the West Side of Manhattan to the parks of Brooklyn and the suburbs of Staten Island – but also turns the endlessly various experience of globalisation into something tangible.
Netherland received exceptional reviews when it was published in 2008. Despite America’s lack of interest in cricket, O’Neill fashioned the sport into a symbol for the entire country. The book also established him as a special kind of post-colonial author, interested in the experiences of rootless Western men adrift in the modern world. For all the privilege of their European or American upbringings – their expensive educations and lucrative jobs – they seem poorly equipped to navigate contemporary life and the shifting tides of international power. Instead, they find themselves caught in the currents of history, struggling to understand the vast forces around them, which cast their lives in unexpected directions.
In Godwin, O’Neill’s latest novel, the author tries something similar with football. This time the narrator is an American called Mark Wolfe, known to his colleagues by his surname, ‘as if he were a TV detective’. Wolfe is a technical writer living in Pittsburgh with his wife and child, producing grant applications for Big Pharma. One day he receives a message from his half-brother, Geoff Anibal, an English football agent who once played semi-professionally for a minor French team. Geoff has acquired video footage of a teenage footballer so skilful he might be the next Messi, but having broken his leg he needs his half-brother to help him track down the prodigy. It’s the search for this talented footballer – Godwin is his name – that provides the book’s narrative engine, with events pinballing between America and England, France and Africa.
There’s little glamorous about these locations. As with Netherland, O’Neill takes more pleasure in describing the overlooked corners of contemporary experience than narrating imagined matches. In Godwin, it is neglected commuter towns and provincial cities: Wolfe finds himself sleeping on a running machine in a bungalow in Walsall, renting a cheap Airbnb in the middle of Le Mans, and being driven from a kebab shop in central Paris to ‘a district of industrial buildings, office parks, and tiny, drab apartment buildings’ near Charles de Gaulle Airport. Many readers will recognise these anonymous neighbourhoods – the dual carriageways and car dealerships, the neglected sporting facilities and post-war housing estates – yet rarely encounter them in contemporary novels. However, as with Netherland, sport provides a way inside.
Wolfe could have refused his brother’s invitation, but he’s desperate for an adventure. Once a brilliant graduate student, he’s now entering middle age to find himself stuck in a professional rut, with a career that lacks prestige or interest. Wolfe’s frustrated character is one of Godwin’s many pleasures, his narrative voice mixing moments of insight with spectacular self-deception: ‘My unspoken fantasy was that I was a furtive ideological hero and that one day I’d come out of hiding and my scorn for riches and recognition would pay off – in recognition and riches, of course. How I lived for years with this garbage is too embarrassing to contemplate. Vanity refers to emptiness, and this conception of myself as a covert winner or dark horse was obviously a way of shovelling dirt into my interior void.’
Wolfe’s sense of aborted purpose is shared by the narrators of O’Neill’s two previous novels, as well as several of his short stories. Characters whose lives have stalled, making them susceptible to the wild schemes of the charismatic figures chance places in their path. These narrators are not amoral, nor are they incompetent, yet they are drawn into the orbit of men who do not find themselves paralysed by thought. In Netherland, Hans becomes a chauffeur to the part-time crook Chuck Ramkissoon, after the latter umpired one of his cricket matches. In The Dog, set in Dubai, a nameless attorney oversees the semi-legal activities of a family of Lebanese billionaires, having befriended one of their sons at college.
The protagonists of all three novels were raised between countries and cultures – as was their author. In an interview with The Guardian, O’Neill explained that, ‘I don’t have a home turf, so I have no choice but to float around in these post-national currents.’ Because O’Neill’s narrators cannot settle in one place, they struggle to work out what they want from life, their reflective passivity mixed with moments of misguided impulsiveness. In the case of Wolfe, helping his brother is an attempt to gain control over his future, but his intelligence is no substitute for experience and his principles little use in a competition without rules. As another character explains: ‘Your integrity, you high standards, your sacrifices, your renunciations – these are noticed only by yourself. Nobody else is keeping track.’
The novel is shared with another narrator, who is likewise the victim of her own principles: a middle-aged black woman named Lakesha, she founded the co-operative of technical writers where Wolfe works, known as the Group. This organisation is falling apart thanks to a series of internal power struggles, which Lakesha outlines in the robotic jargon of an American HR department. The novel actually opens from her perspective, discussing office politics in an earnest fashion: ‘Annie and I agreed that the co-operative movement’s traditional principles should be affirmed in the Guidelines and put at the centre of the Group’s identity. It worked very well.’ At first, I wondered whether this was an act of editorial triangulation, attempting to broaden Godwin’s audience by introducing a corporate subplot. However, O’Neill continues to juggle perspectives throughout the book, not only swapping between Lakesha and Wolfe, but also giving long passages to a sports agent named Jean-Luc Lefebvre.
Lefebvre is an ageing and overweight Frenchman. He drinks beer, smokes cheroots and makes the kind of broad cultural generalisations that appal Wolfe’s liberal sensibilities. He also delivers long lectures on the greatest talents in football’s history and the corruption of the contemporary game, as well as windy philosophical theories that turn sports matches into an existential struggle. ‘Lefebvre gives a troubled shake of the head. The question of the value of football weighs on him these days, he says. Football is a diversion, a pastime, something that is extra. It revolves around the simplest, most childish activity, loved even by dogs: playing with a ball. The ball game was not supposed to be the difference between having nothing and having plenty, between having faith and not having faith, between having life and not having life.’
The Frenchman is a wonderful comic creation – even for those with little interest in football. His indulgent stories are undercut by deadpan humour, along with Wolfe’s sceptical commentary. ‘He goes on talking, this man who is ignorant of his own ignorance, who confuses solipsism with philosophical thought, who privileges his random musings merely because they happen to have occurred to him. Not to be a snob, but who does he think he is? What qualifies him to play on the same field, so to speak, as professional thinkers. His self-absorption, his disappearance up his own ass, is total.’ These exchanges read like the meandering monologues found in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, but related by the kind of caustic narrator who belongs in a Martin Amis novel. As a result, O’Neill can follow a series of fascinating digressions, while reassuring the reader he has not lost control.
Wolfe was sent to Lefebvre by his brother. The French agent then tricks him into giving away the prodigy’s location, before travelling to Africa himself. He ends up in Oudiah – once the main slaving port for West Africa – where he visits the museums and monuments to that trade. The choice of location is no accident, and there’s a suggestive echo in the figure of a white man searching the settlements of West Africa for adolescent boys, before taking them away from their families to an unknown future in the West. Lefebvre recognises this echo when he glimpses a group of teenagers running along a beach: ‘But the timeless, hypnotic spectacle, that of a group of strong, determined young men moving toward him at a speed that he could not possibly hope to outrun, was enough, Lefebvre claims, to make him feel a chill in his bones for the wretches of yesteryear who would have observed the warriors of the slaving parties inescapably closing in on them from afar, across the savanna…’
The nested narrators, the African journey, the ruthless extractions of the capitalist system – all this recalls the novels of Joseph Conrad. Godwin makes clear that the imperial networks of the late nineteenth century and the commercial networks of the twenty-first resemble one another; in particular, the way that money can transplant people across borders. Even though Conrad’s novels critiqued the colonial system, they were more interested in the moral compromises made by European outcasts on the fringes of empire. Similarly, O’Neill’s true target in Godwin is not the excesses and abuses of the modern football industry, but the little lies with which the characters serving that system justify their crimes. Darkness is less a place on the map than a place in the heart.
Whatever the sport – football, cricket, the Olympic Games – we want to believe the best players are the products of pure meritocracy. However, O’Neill suggests that the athletes who reach the top might be caught on the same currents of chance that determine the rest of our lives. In The Dog, this idea was voiced via anxious indecision, in Netherland through lyrical ambivalence: ‘I felt shame – I see this clearly, now – at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavours…’ Godwin is pitched midway between the two, the humour edged with pathos, the beauty blending with the absurd. Wolfe thinks he’s the novel’s protagonist, but the plot keeps humiliating his attempts to author his own life – first comically, and then tragically.
Perhaps because Godwin has the most elaborate plot of O’Neill’s novels, it also provides the most satisfying conclusion. At times the book’s delays feel deliberate, at other times the sudden changes of course feel forced, but in the final pages the two narrative strands – the search for the African football prodigy and the internal struggles of the co-op – reach an unlikely resolution. If these characters achieve anything, it’s the slow shedding of self-delusion, with naïve ideals replaced by a recognition of human failings: their own, their colleagues’ and those of the people they love. In the novel’s last section, Lakesha leaves behind the Group in Pittsburgh to take up an unexpected role in Godwin’s life, deciding that, ‘Mutually beneficial arrangements are the most durable and do the most good.’ It’s a modest conclusion, but set against a backdrop of historical exploitation and present-day inequality, the promise of an honest exchange where both people benefit represents a small, sustaining victory.
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Joseph O’Neill lives in New York and teaches at Bard College. He is the author of five novels, Netherland (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008), The Dog, This Is the Life, The Breezes and Godwin, as well as a memoir, Blood-Dark Track.
Guy Stagg is the author of The Crossway, an account of his ten-month walk to Jerusalem. It won the Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019, as well as being shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019, the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019 and the Somerset Maugham Award 2019. His next book, The World Within, about the role of retreat in creative careers, will be published in 2025.
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