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A Book of Two Halves
Edited by Nicholas Royle
Gollancz, paperback, 288 pages, £9.99
Review by David Kendall (1997)

A collection of twenty-four short stories and three poems about football. Do we need any more football? Being of that strange breed who couldn’t give a toss what happens on big green playgrounds on a Saturday I approached this warily. At least I understood what was going on most of the time, which is more than I can say for the real thing.

Like most anthologies, A Book of Two Halves is hit and miss. In the former category comes the fantastic, surreal, axe-in-the-face opener from M John Harrison, which would stand out in any collection. Other winners were Liz Jensen’s ‘Sent Off’, a superb invocation of spleen and table football. Christopher Fowler’s end-piece, ‘Permanent Fixture’, is unusually whimsical for him but as enjoyable as ever. In the schoolboy memories subdivision, Graham Joyce’s ‘A Tip From Bobby Moore’ gets match points for painful believability. These were the high spots for me, probably because all four impinge on something other than shared recognition/pleasure in football. Anybody ever carried along in a large crowd must have felt something of the latent dark joy within that Fowler channels into ‘Permanent Fixture’.

A football story from Iain Sinclair? I had high hopes, but beneath all the brilliant magnum power language lay a story which seemed straight out of EC’s Tales From the Crypt. I love those comics but was expecting more. That said, despite his description of White Hart Lane with its stadium lights too weak to ‘turn night into day’, the ‘illumination enjoyed by brain-wired beagles’ had me dazzled all the same.

Irvine Welsh’s invective is catapulted through the by now expected procession of drugs, football and philosophy. This last part sounded hollow and contrived to me, reducing his characters to simplistic mouthpieces. Maybe he just knows better educated druggies than I do. Stephen Baxter’s wonderfully titled ‘Clods’ sticks the studs into HG Wells in an inoffensive manner. Bit of a one joke story that, as with Nicholas Lezard’s ‘The Beautiful Game’ and Kim Newman’s ‘The Germans Won’. I think you’d have to actually care about what they’re taking the piss out of to get the most from their stories. Newman’s swipe at Jeff Archer was a nice touch though. 'Sorted' by Michael Marshall Smith is a short stylish romp of sex and killing with sparse hints of Faustian pacts lurking in the shadows which knows just when to end.

All in all a selection of mainly decent short stories with a few sparklers, a few duds. Not enough to convince me that bed isn’t the best place to be at the weekend. Fans of the game, snap up for novelty value; others, flick through in the shop first. •

Full contents:

M John Harrison – I Did it
Christopher Kenworthy – Them Belgiums
Irvine Welsh – The Best Brand of Football 
Tim Lawler – Villa
Stephen Baxter – Clods
Maureen Freely – More Than Just A Game
Tim Pears – Ebony International
Conrad Williams– aet
Nicholas Lezard – The Beautiful Game
Glyn Maxwell – Injured Men are Talking
Steve Grant – Casuals
Iain Sinclair – Hardball
Nicholas Royle – Referee’s Report
Graham Joyce – A Tip from Bobby Moore
Geoff Nicholson – The Visiting Side
Geoff Dyer – Passage Thiéré
Mark Timlin – Wonder Boy [a Nick Sharman story]
Michael Marshall Smith – Sorted
Liz Jensen – sent Off
James Miller – Scoring
Mark Morris – The Shirt
Kim Newman – The Germans Won
John Hegley – Hat-trick (3 poems): A Comparison of the On-Form Tony Yeboah and Yer Boa Constrictor; Centre Forward-Looking; Bristol City Versus Luton
Simon Ings – Sobras The Sacrifice
Christopher Fowler – Permanent Fixture

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