Cricket is for losers

Life,​ for the narrators of Joseph O’Neill’s five novels, is experienced as a series of reversals as unexpected as they are humiliating. James Jones, the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes (1995) clarifies the pessimism of the first novel. John Breeze’s mother was ‘killed by lightning’, we learn, but we mustn’t suppose lightning can’t strike twice. John thinks of Wile E. Coyote, whose crackpot attempts to catch Road Runner always meet with disaster, ‘undone by a circumstance beyond his control’. Similarly, some ‘invisible, all-powerful tormentor’ appears to be targeting John’s family. Both he and his father suffer any number of ‘evil accidents’: burglary, sacking, abandonment.

Two character traits make setbacks inevitable. ‘Sensitivity to concealed thoughts and emotions is not my strong point,’ James Jones admits. ‘Socially, I am unskilful.’ As a result, other people appear mysterious and unpredictable. Women come on to O’Neill’s narrators when they least expect it, then abandon them just as unexpectedly. ‘To this day I cannot believe my luck,’ John Breeze says of his first encounter with Angela, a bright young careerist, only to be bewildered when she coolly cuts him out of her life. Trust is almost always misplaced. Nevertheless – and this is the second quality – however depressed and listless these men may briefly become, like Coyote they bounce back, spurred by ambition and blind self-belief. When Donovan contacts James, now a lowly solicitor, and asks him to process his divorce, James imagines that his early dreams of a brilliant career will finally be realised, when what lies ahead is in fact more humiliation. At the end of The Breezes, on his way to a meeting where Angela will doubtless end their relationship for good, John thinks: ‘You never know, things may turn out all right.’

This Is the Life is set in London, The Breezes in what appears to be Ireland. O’Neill was born in Cork in 1964 to an Irish father and a Turkish mother, grew up mainly in the Netherlands, studied and practised law in England, and moved in 1998 to New York, where he set the novel that made his name, Netherland (2008). Three catastrophes are declared early in the book: the collective trauma of 9/11; the abandonment of the Dutch narrator, Hans Van Den Broek, by his English wife, Rachel, who returns to London with their young son (‘unhappiness took me unawares,’ he tells us); and, peripherally but poignantly, the disappearance then death of Hans’s close friend, the irrepressible Chuck Ramkissoon. Yet Netherland is quite different in tone and structure from the early novels. The narrator is no longer a comic loser destined to repeat the same mistakes ad infinitum but a successful, self-deprecating market analyst, with whom the reader is happy to spend time. And while history and geography are largely irrelevant in the early novels, here they are everything. Rachel claims she is leaving New York and her husband out of fear of further terrorist attacks and disgust at American foreign policy.

When, to fill the emptiness caused by the loss of his family, Hans digs out his old cricket gear and goes to play with a variegated group of immigrants on a miserable pitch on Staten Island, the book finds a focus that brings together the private, the public and the global. In an America obsessed with winning, cricket is a loser’s sport, and all the more beguiling for that. Hans meets Chuck, an enigmatic Trinidadian umpire who preaches the civilising aspects of the game, but turns out to be as ruthless as the next man. Like other O’Neill protagonists, Hans consistently misreads people. A woman called Danielle seduces him with repeated declarations of how much she ‘trusts’ him then, after a night together at his home in the Chelsea Hotel, never answers his calls. But in post-9/11 New York such equivocations are par for the course. They provide fodder for an inexhaustible flow of observations (‘I was, it will be understood, afflicted … by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights’), which Hans delivers in glittering, metaphor-rich prose somewhat surprising in a Dutch-born expert on oil markets. But the reader is happy to suspend disbelief. O’Neill, we were told at the time, himself lived in the Chelsea Hotel and played cricket on Staten Island. He knew the territory. Critics could enthuse about a new kind of postcolonial novel.

O’Neill’s fourth book, The Dog (2014), is set in a Dubai whose ‘undeclared mission is to make itself indistinguishable from its airport’. Again a reversal of fortune sets off a chain of events: not only has the unnamed narrator, a New York attorney, been left by his long-term girlfriend, she has also cleaned out his bank account. Depressed, he accepts a meaningless job as financial adviser to a rich Middle Eastern family. Again the narrator takes up an outdoor hobby, this time scuba diving. Again an enigmatic, lively acquaintance disappears. Again there is a flow of aperçus (‘one way to sum up the stupidity of this phase of my life … would be to call it a phase of insights’). Yet The Dog feels closer in tone to the earlier novels than to Netherland. Its defensive facetiousness has a souring effect. There is no opening to the surrounding world, no relief from a bewildered yet complacent self-absorption. Here is the narrator reframing the story of his girlfriend’s treachery:

The matter can be put this way: X, a good person, is subject to episodes of somnambulism. During one of these episodes she unconsciously takes possession of an envelope belonging to V, her friend. X wakes up and finds the envelope. It is marked ‘V’s Life Savings’, and it contains one hundred thousand USD. V asks X for the return of the envelope. X – who is, incidentally, a rich woman with no financial obligations or ambitions that she cannot very easily satisfy, whereas V is hard up – refuses. She keeps V’s money. Question: Why would X, a good person, do this? Answer: I don’t know. It’s incomprehensible.

In interviews O’Neill has spoken about his wariness of ‘the sort of middling kind of novel that tides you over between novels’. His new book, Godwin, comes ten years after The Dog. It’s an account of the search for a phenomenally talented adolescent footballer thought to be living somewhere in Africa. Cyrille, a ‘“dodgy” Ivorian’ who possesses video footage of the boy, refers to him as Godwin, a name that brings together deity and victory. Godwin comes to represent the extraordinary potential of human talent, or a modern kind of slave, or simply a financial ‘bonanza’ for whoever manages to sign him up. In short, O’Neill gives us an encounter between the contemporary West, with its greed and its moral handwringing, and Africa: ‘Whenever he has returned to Africa,’ we hear of one character, ‘it has always been with the sentiment of defeat, of demoralisation.’

This time around there are two narrators. Lakesha Williams runs a technical writers’ co-operative in Pittsburgh. Her only meaningful relationship is with her dog, Cutie, but she is happy in her job and heavily invested in the professional community she serves (‘Idealism, if it’s real, means extra work’). Lakesha is Black. She grew up in a dysfunctional home in a poverty-stricken district of Milwaukee, but a professor noticed her academic talents and helped her get a scholarship to a university in Pittsburgh. She is herself a kind of Godwin, but her function in the novel is to introduce us to her colleague Mark Wolfe, the main narrator and a more typical O’Neill protagonist, for whom she serves as a contrast.

Wolfe isn’t happy being a technical writer. He once had other ambitions. In his frustration, he abuses the ‘front-desk agent’ of the building where the co-operative has its office. Lakesha, attentive to the organisation’s rule book and suspecting ‘a crisis of dignity’, gently takes him to task. When she asks Wolfe whether he’s all right, O’Neill, with his enviable capacity for capturing contemporary jargon and foibles, has him explain that ‘his worries were connected to a concern about “the commons” in the context of “collapse” (of human civilisation, possibly, or maybe capitalism).’ Lakesha suggests he take a two-week break, and the narrative baton is passed.

Wolfe lives with his wife, Sushila, and their daughter, Fizzy. ‘After years of blundering introspection,’ he says, ‘I accidentally tripped on private happiness.’ Determined to ‘defend this marvellous fortune’, he has ‘fought a successful battle’ against ‘morbid self-regard’, embracing ‘obscurity’ and the notion that ‘so-called failure … was much more honourable than so-called success.’ This is achieved partly by deciding that ‘the world is rotten. To step outside is to enter a vicious element.’ The most vicious person of all, he believes, is his ‘biological mother’, who deprived him of a substantial inheritance from his late father and cannot ‘be understood without reference to the techniques of animal predation’. Sushila provides a ‘buffer’ between himself and people like his mother. Yet Wolfe holds onto an ‘unspoken fantasy’ that ‘one day I’d come out of hiding and my scorn for riches and recognition would pay off – in recognition and riches.’ Hence it is ominous when his two-week break from technical writing coincides with a summons from his half-brother Geoff in England, who asks him for help while dangling the prospect of ‘a business opportunity’. A reformed Wile E. Coyote is to be tempted by a last shot at Road Runner.

O’Neill has said that plot is ‘not important at all’ to him, yet what follows are 250 pages of twists and turns so densely plotted as to leave the reader befuddled. Geoff, who is half-French and speaks English in a ‘London-Jamaican argot’, is never more than a comic foil to Wolfe’s conflicted earnestness. An apprentice football agent, he is in possession of the video footage of Godwin, whom he believes may be the young footballer seen in Togo by an ageing French scout, Jean-Luc Lefebvre. Since Geoff is incapacitated by a broken leg, Wolfe, who knows nothing about football, is to go to Le Mans, meet Lefebvre, show him the video and get confirmation that the two boys are the same. Wolfe resists at first, but his unspoken fantasy soon takes over. In Le Mans, Lefebvre launches into rambling reflections on the history of football for the benefit of the naive American. He talks of ‘the growing supremacy of the African footballer’, tells the story of Didier Drogba’s transformation from a ‘normal player’ to a ‘phenomenon’ (‘it was as if in Brittany Drogba had drunk the magic potion of Panoramix’) and gives a sentimental account of the funeral of the Portuguese star Eusébio (‘young men threw themselves on the grave and kissed it’).

When the conversation turns to Godwin’s whereabouts, Wolfe falls into ‘a fever of tactical calculations’ as to how he might trick his host into divulging information without him having to pay for it. At this point the novel shifts from sober realism to a muddle of farce, yarn and well-worn football legend. O’Neill doesn’t seek to evoke an intimate engagement with the sport, as he did with cricket in Netherland, but rather to conjure a deranged, predominantly male state of mind in which football is at once the measure of everything and an invitation to dream of fantastic wealth. Wolfe misreads Lefebvre’s expression on seeing the video as confirmation that the Togolese player is Godwin. He spends the night in a cheap hotel, obsessively running an app he happens to have on his laptop that enables him to compare the topography of stadiums in Togo with that of the ground in the video. Miraculously, a straying cursor leads him to discover that the stadium in question isn’t in Togo, but Benin. The plot grows wilder and wackier, as in a cartoon. Wolfe betrays his brother by signing a contract with Lefebvre and, forgetting his family obligations, prepares to travel to Africa. But he is betrayed in turn: Lefebvre absconds with the contract and sets out for Benin alone. Wolfe flies home, sheepish but somewhat relieved, and returns to the humdrum realities of technical writing.

One characteristic of O’Neill’s writing is that while his narrators are often in a state of panic and disorientation, the prose remains assured. This can be understood as a form of denial on the protagonist’s part, or a determination to retain control, but it does create a distancing effect. It’s hard not to feel that O’Neill is more interested in Wolfe’s caustic musings on smartphones, Eurostar, game theory and Le Mans cathedral than in this improbable football tale.

The narrative soon switches back to Lakesha and another personal upheaval. Her friend Annie, the other founding partner of the co-operative, announces out of the blue that she’s leaving to take up a lucrative job in California. It’s not exactly a betrayal, but Lakesha experiences it as such. When elections for a new governing committee are held, she realises that her trust in her colleagues was misplaced (‘it’s a generally punishable folly to approach life trustingly,’ Hans remarks in Netherland). A malign figure, Edil, uses a sheaf of proxy votes to get herself and the hotheaded Wolfe elected, then treacherously accuses both Lakesha and Wolfe of corruption. The office drama is gripping, but we know it’s there only to provide context and framing for the main plot, which seems even more outlandish when we return to it.

One evening, some six months after Wolfe’s return from Le Mans, he and Sushila are arguing about his mother when Lefebvre turns up at their suburban home, establishes himself on the deck with the first of many beers, and launches into a story that will last seventy pages. In no hurry to disclose the few facts that matter to his listeners, he ‘pontificates’ on the state of football in the US, the women’s game, the American landscape, American history, famous air crashes in which footballers died, voodoo, roadside life in Africa and much else. (All of this is relayed in Wolfe’s irritated account.) Lefebvre tells the life stories of the people he met in Benin (involving much satire at the expense of Western tourists), peppered with nuggets of football wisdom: ‘He had long believed that to play with a ball was to make a harmonious kind of contact with the universe, itself of course filled with spheres.’ There is some comedy as Wolfe becomes paranoid about his wife’s indulgence towards their visitor. ‘Are they in league?’ he worries. Finally, after various shenanigans reintroducing Wolfe’s fatuous half-brother and devious mother, Lefebvre describes his first sighting of Godwin, running on a beach. ‘Not just any beach’, but the very place where for centuries slaves were traded. The boy, too, is a commodity. Recounting the story, Lefebvre becomes emotional and stands up to imitate ‘the gait of the long-gone enslaved persons as they were marched towards the ocean with chains attached to their feet’. It was ‘like Auschwitz’, he says.

It’s hard to know how much seriousness to attach to Godwin. At times I got the impression that O’Neill had produced a kind of structural version of the facetiousness that characterises The Dog, an extended parody of the literary novel of connections, parallels, symbolism and moral weight. Certainly he has managed to instil in his reader the same anxiety of misreading intention or misplacing trust that plagues his characters. In the final fifty pages he tosses all his cards into the air and after a whirligig of incident and accident contrives to have them flutter down in such a way that Godwin and Lakesha meet in Milwaukee. The reader is impressed most of all by the effort required to do this.