A Natural

Football is our nation’s sport. Many of us love it. Many of us hate it. No one can avoid it. Yet for all its coverage and celebrity few fiction books are written about it. Only David Peace has come to mainstream prominence for his ‘faction’ writing, combining journalistic rigour with creative license to draw portraits on Messrs Clough and Shankly in Damned United and Red or Dead. A lot of this might be to do with snobbery. Literature is seen as highbrow; football low. Consequently, football rarely gets a kick when it comes to literary publishing. 

I really recommend David Peace.

Last year I had Ross Raisin’s book A Natural on my wish list. In 2008 my friend Jim introduced Raisin to me. His debut novel God’s Own Country, set in the Yorkshire Moors, heralded the arrival of a bright, young talent. Raisin wrote in the vernacular, capturing the voice of the rural north, telling a story that belied the country-bumpkin stereotype, instead invoking the Brontian depiction of brutal hill life. His follow-up Waterline was a quiet masterpiece: set in post-shipbuilding Glasgow it tells the story of a craftsman’s slide into homelessness. Again, Raisin proved himself a wonderful mimic, funnelling Glaswegian onto the page. In both books Raisin proved himself adept at documenting life on the margins. The farming and shipbuilding community get very little press attention; in showing us these worlds we get an insight into places forgotten by Westminster.

As well as my love for Raisin’s previous books, I was excited about The Natural because it was about the world of football. I’ve been a football fan since I was six years old. In supporting Watford I’ve mainly seen us stagnate in football's second tier. Although there have been years where we’ve plumbed the depths of the third, today we soar the skies of the Premier League. As a child too, I would spend my holidays in Swanage where my Auntie Joan ... (Joan, for the record, wasn’t my real aunt; she was a friend of my Nan. When is this fake branding of aunts and uncles going to stop? I think it’s a conspiracy by parents to make us buy presents for their children. If people keep calling me ‘uncle Ryan’ in front of their children, subconsciously I feel bound to them. So when I’m visiting I think, “I must get my nephew/niece a present.” It’s only know I’ve really thought about it that I realise what a racket these parents are running. It’s a McMafia crime ring on a global scale. I bet the nefarious MumsNet are behind it.) Back to Joan: she used to take my brother and I to watch Bournemouth play in the days they didn’t have a millionaire chairman. A time of terraces, clackers and pools coupon; where cheating and diving were a Black Mirror episode, and team numbers were 1-11. So when it comes to football my eyes are journeymen: they’ve seen the highs of Cristiano Ronaldo’s dancing feet; they’ve witnessed the lows of Devon White falling over himself.

I used to stand here at Bournemouth.

Like his other novels, Raisin’s book A Natural turns its binoculars on an unreported part of Britain: lower league football. Tom Pearman has been ‘let go’ by a Premier League club and must now ply his trade in the pitches Murdoch forgot. Uprooted from his boyhood club and home, he is in every sense ‘heading south.’ Cast out of the footballing heavens, he must now live a Partridge limbo of hotel residence and takeout meals. He’s quiet too, which makes interacting with other players difficult. Fortunately, life improves when a surrogate family take him under roof, sheltering him with curfews and chatter. The Daveys take in young footballers because they love the team, known only in the book as Town, and because their eldest children have gone and upped sticks. Liam, the groundsman for Town, is one such child; it's he who strikes up a friendship with Tom.

Over the course of the book we see how this friendship grows into a clandestine relationship, with both men fully aware of its dangers. The love affair between the two is redolent of Brokeback Mountain with Liam being the more experienced, and Tom the more taciturn of the two. Like Proulx’s novella, the men are homosexuals in a heteronormative world: different lifestyles are for elsewhere; they can't exist here. This is painfully characterised in the few sex scenes between the two, where Tom’s fit of sexual pleasure soon recedes into burning shame.

The book doesn’t just shine a light on gay footballers – which there must be some- it also exposes the ‘footballer's wife' stereotype. Because of the ITV show and World Cup WAG coverage, footballers wives are often seen as pan holders in the OK magazine gold rush. The tabloids present these women as intellectually stupid and Machiavellian smart when it comes to ‘snagging’ footballing real estate. The truth is a lot of footballers meet their girlfriends in childhood, when indoor pools and country house self-portraits don't exist. For wives of league two players, their husbands earn a kind slice, but they hardly make a whole pie; as a result their job description is vast: budget a huge mortgage, raise children, promote husband’s ego, relegate personal dreams, abate footballing depressions: injury, trolling, loss of form, transfer talk, terrace chants; all whilst looking beautiful. Raisin explores these challenges through the character of Leah, the wife of Town’s captain.

Not every WAG is auto-tuned.

In making a gay footballer and footballer’s wife the two central characters of the story, Raisin’s  novel breaks new ground. David Peace’s books focused on the titans of the game, the men at the centre circle of sporting history; Raisin, on the other hand, has taken the match ball home, telling us the stories of what happens behind closed doors. Therefore, A Natural, is an intimate novel that deserves greater recognition. Quite why this book wasn't lauded in the same way as his first is mystifying. Because through A Natural, Raisin has cemented himself as a natural writer, one who has sacrificed linguistic step overs for passing insightful comment. He is the Michael Carrick of writers. One who deserves his name sung from the terraces.

A Natural is out now.