Anyone employed in an enterprise of more than a handful of people will know about mundane workplace bureaucracy as well as the fraught undertone of office politics.
Anyone who enjoys football will understand the sport’s thrall — how, in its striving and struggle, the need for diligence and practice, the patterns of beauty in teamwork but often, too, the way randomness creates cruel outcomes, it is a metaphor for life.
Booker prize-nominated author Joseph O’Neill blends these two ambits of human endeavour in his new novel, Godwin.
The two primary plot lines are told by separate narrators. One, Lakesha Williams, is a 30-ish African-American career woman, cofounder and joint-CEO of a technical writing collective based in Pittsburgh in America called, with appropriate blandness, the Group. The organisation seems to epitomise a successful, collaborative enterprise, but Williams, in her need to constantly tell herself of this, is subconsciously aware not only that something is brewing behind her back, but that there has to be more to her soulless life.
The second, wider story involving football, family, African history and postcolonialism, is narrated by one of the Group’s writer-associates, Mark Wolfe. An oddball loner, Wolfe is hyper-intelligent, low on self-esteem, but self-aware, telling us that he has “yet to recover from a decade spent as an active member of the American intelligentsia, a time of sterility and mediocrity and snark”.
Wolfe gets an opportunity to overhaul his life when he receives a call from his half-brother, Geoff, an inept football agent in Europe. Geoff is on the trail of a teenager, somewhere in Africa and known only as Godwin, who — a grainy video clip proves — has the potential to become the next Maradona or Messi. The video has been seen by only a few people; signing up Godwin would be the key to a fortune in finder’s fees, agent’s commissions and spin-offs in the lucrative football industry.
Despite seeing through his brother’s manipulative braggadocio and fake displays of sibling affection, Wolfe is persuaded to help find Godwin. Which, amazingly, he does. Using geolocation technology to pinpoint Godwin to a remote part of Benin in West Africa, the mission changes. How to physically find him, sign him as a client, and fast-track him into a professional club?
This turns into an odyssey. Wolfe ropes in a genuine, semi-retired French football agent, Jean-Luc Lefebvre, a caricature of the canny, omniscient football sage.
Lefebvre’s character, weaving together football, philosophy and practicalities, and of a generation schooled in colonialist sentiments, is both delightful and needling. He spins yarns of footballing legends, mainly from the period 1950-1980, attempting to connect the beautiful game to the meaning of life.
Soccer followers will revel in these passages; here, O’Neill’s prose hearkens the great Uruguayan football writer Eduardo Galeano, but, as narrated retrospectively from Wolfe’s viewpoint as an American largely ignorant about the sport, with a tongue-in-cheek element, mocking its own hyperbole.
Sometimes they seem rambling and irrelevant, but Lefebvre’s reflections on the game’s darker aspects within its corporatisation provide some of the book’s best lines and most profound insights. Musing on inequality and the disadvantages of the Global South, and the fact that for millions a soccer prodigy in the family is the only way out of poverty, he muses that “football ... revolves around the simplest, most childish activity, loved even by dogs: playing with a ball. This 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. A sport is not supposed to have that importance”.
But Lefebvre and his ilk are one of the reasons it does. Shrugging at the motivation of greed, he points out that anyone who loves the game is a scout, that “all are implicated in the search for the great player, the future vedette”. This is about more than football: “The parent who does not inspect the child in the hope of seeing the trace of the eternal, that parent does not exist,” he believes.
Other of his stories mention aviation accidents in which fantastic players and entire squads of great teams died, like the 1949 Superga hill Piedmont crash, involving Italian giants Torino, and the loss of many of the legendary Manchester United team in the 1958 Munich airport crash. The relevance becomes clearer, later.
And there’s a sinister side to Lefebvre’s second-hand narration, which surfaces in the journeying through Benin. As he is guided from the largest city, Cotonou, through former slave-lands and voodoo territories of the erstwhile Kingdom of Dahomey, he becomes a distinct derivative of Joseph Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness.
The plot has a void as to what really happens in Benin, but through a combination of Lefebvre’s determination, trickery involving, bizarrely, Wolfe’s mother, and fate — the football gods, perhaps — Godwin is found.
But the game has just begun, and the last third of the book has numerous plot twists — some foreshadowed, others more unpredictable. Across the Atlantic, Williams’ world is thrown into turmoil. Having thought of herself as benevolent, a “cooperator” wedded to principles such as solidarity and equity, and attached her identity exclusively to “the high-minded notions of community I had projected onto the Group”, it’s made clear to her that she is no longer wanted. Jolted, she needs to make hard choices, ones that will hopefully usher her into fuller participation in the flow of life.
Ironically, given that business (still) and soccer are dominated by men, ultimately the smartest and strongest characters in the book are women — and not just the anticipated or principal ones. The Group’s takeover is orchestrated by a scheming, small-enterprise, female version of Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. Williams, guided by Wolfe’s wise wife, encouraged by a sister she had previously chosen to shut out, and enabled by the hidden hand of Wolfe’s mother, reconnects the pieces of her life. More than these vague hints would be spoilers as to how the threads of the plot loop together in the final pages.
And the final few sentences, as a snapshot of the American dream tinged with the reality of the nation’s current societal discord, are exquisite. Fresh perspectives bring renewal and new horizons, O’Neill says, and there is always the next match — reason enough to keep playing the game of life.
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