Away with the Lairys (Football Factory / Headhunters / England Away - John King)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Football Factory / Headhunters / England Away - John King
Date:	26/07/00 (140 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Another example of how hype rarely delivers.

Disadvantages: There are much better writers receiving much less attention.

John King, The Football Factory Trilogy

Someone in the Guardian (Mark Stein, I think) once pointed out in a review of an earthy film that the French have a useful concept known as *nostalgie de la boue*. The Oxford English Dictionary translates it as “a yearning for mud”. Slumming it. Rough trade. In an artistic sense. The concept seems to apply to John King's books too: football hooliganism and shagging. The Football Factory kicked it off. A working-class lad whose name escaped me - if it's mentioned, I missed it, because I rapidly got bored with the book and stopped reading properly - narrates episodes from his life as a Chelsea fan. “West Ham at Home” is one chapter heading. “Newcastle Away” is another. Punch-ups, pub windows put through, faces slashed, and so on.

The descriptions have the ring - or thud - of authenticity, particularly when nothing goes off in the “Newcastle Away” chapter because the police have tracked the coaches and make sure those on board don't get loose in Newcastle (except for some, not including the narrator, who leave the coaches and hire taxis). In between the hooligan chapters, however, are vignettes from other parts of working-class life, and they aren't convincing. The sex is weak, even risible, and King doesn't have much of an ear for dialog, particularly not for badinage and wit.

Headhunters was the follow-up and is sailing under false colors, because it's named after the most famous Chelsea hooligan gang and doesn't have much hooliganism in it. I’d given up reading properly long before I reached this section of the three-in-one volume, so I can't say much about it except that the other parts of working-class life are predominating and King's weaknesses are letting him down even more badly. Presumably King's editor realized this and made him use the deceptive title to draw in the people attracted by the violence
of the first book.

And presumably the editor made him concentrate more on the violence in the final book in the trilogy, England Away. There are attempts here to draw parallels between English football hooliganism and English militarism but I think that they, like everything else “significant” King tries to say, don't work, and the sex - with a Thai prostitute in Amsterdam called Nicky and a German nymphomaniac called Ingrid - is even less convincing than it was before. According to the back cover, the magazine Total Football has described King as “the nation's finest writer of football fiction”. That's bollocks. He says very little about football, though he says a lot about a particular culture associated with it. According to the front cover, Irvine Welsh has described King as “the author of the best books written about English culture since the War”. Welsh is either talking out of his arse (as usual) or taking the piss out of the English.

Summary: