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Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications

Boys Will Be Hooligans: History and Masculine Communities in John King’s England Away

MIGUEL MOTA

ABSTRACT: Ostensibly primarily preoccupied with representations of foot-ball hooligan culture, John King’s 1998 novel England Away simultaneously addresses broader connections among sports, masculinities, and nationalism. King’s novel provides insight into how the white hooligan culture that has surrounded English football is compellingly implicated in the articulation of specific nationalist discursive practices. In doing so, it affords a unique perspec-tive on the relationship between discourses of masculinity and national identities in postcolonial Western societies.

Keywords: football, hooliganism, John King, masculinities, nationalism

or over a hundred years, professional football (or soccer) has played a powerful and compelling role in England in the lives of countless working-class men and boys. Between its professionalization in the late

nineteenth century and more recent attempts to sanitize and “elevate” the game through gentrification, English football has functioned as a cultural space for pat-terns of white masculine working-class practices and expressions. It is English football culture as precisely this kind of classed, raced, and gendered domain that the early novels of John King explore. King’s “football trilogy,” compris-ing the novels Football Factory (1996), Headhunters (1997), and England Away (1998), examines the subtle relationships and identities that exist within the so-called “hooligan” community.1 This community, conventionally seen as static and homogeneous by outside observers—and often described as the “English

F

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disease”—has been for many unfortunately emblematic of the sport in England. Although they are preoccupied with hooligan culture, King’s novels simultane-ously address broader connections among sport, masculinities, and nationalism. If Paul Gilroy is correct in insisting that the political language of sport remains significant in our day “because it is around sport that more habitable and [. . .] more modern formations of national identity have been powerfully articulated” (116–17), then England Away provides insight into how the white hooligan culture that has surrounded English football is compellingly implicated in the articulation of specific nationalist discursive practices. The book affords a unique perspective on the relationship between discourses of masculinity and national identities in postcolonial western societies.

King has published seven novels, is praised by Irvine Welsh on his book jackets as “[t]he author of the best books written about English culture since the war,” and has been the occasional subject of controversy in the British media.2 Yet in his recent How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic, categorizes King merely as a writer of “hooligan fiction” and situates him uncritically and unfairly amidst a slew of practitioners of what Foer calls “hooligan lit” (100).3 In fact, King may be more fruitfully placed in a tradi-tion of twentieth-century writers, ranging from T. S. Eliot to George Orwell to Hanif Kureishi, who have attempted to define what it means to be “English” in a postcolonial age. Alongside Eliot’s “Gothic churches and the music of Elgar” (31), Orwell’s “old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning” (57), and Kureishi’s “yoga exercises, going to Indian restau-rants, [and] the music of Bob Marley” (143), we now also find King’s “skinheads running over the bridge heading for Hayes with a big mob behind them, locals outnumbering the shaven-headed aliens ten to one [. . .] big blokes with machetes and those kung-fu sticks Indians use when they’re looking for trouble” (Football Factory 176).

There is much more at work in King’s novels than mere romanticized celebra-tion of masculine disaffection and violence. Admittedly, the line is not always clearly drawn between the assertion of a kind of obstinate jingoism based on race and class and a more nuanced critique of a set of specific masculinist discursive practices. In an interview following the release of the 2004 film adaptation of Football Factory, King alluded to his ongoing interest in the “anger of so many white working people” in England: “I am talking about people who are not liberal or trendy left, but anti-EU and patriotic, proud of their culture and sick of being told they are shit by our social controllers in politics and the media” (Ciesla). Such comments would appear to place King solidly, and problemati-cally, among the often racist and xenophobic white underclass community about whom he writes.4 Yet the novels themselves provide a critical distance as well as a subtle ambivalence and ambiguity that complicate the more strident, confident statements above. England Away in particular, by situating the English hooligan within the broader space of Europe in the late 1990s—when hooligan culture was

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popularly perceived as being on the wane—addresses the significant role that specific reconstructions of history play in formations of individual and national identities, and the book resists easy assumptions about the culture that King both celebrates and interrogates.

England Away juxtaposes three narrative strands and voices, the first two drawn from a group of working-class supporters of the London-based club Chelsea as they travel with other national-team supporters through Amsterdam to Berlin for a “friendly” between England and Germany; the third voice belongs to a World War II veteran back in north London as he reflects on his life and especially on his wartime experiences. King deftly interweaves the narratives so that each reflects and comments on the other, with apparently banal actions and exchanges accumulating suggestive resonance through juxtaposition. Much of this resonance depends on some awareness of the various roles that football has played historically in the English national consciousness.

King recognizes English football as a historical vehicle for cultural reproduc-tions and practices, and his novels place the activities of the football fan in the context of a history that seeks to understand, if not explain or justify, the cultural position of the hooligan. Robert Malcolmson demonstrates that the close identifica-tion of football with drunken rowdiness and violence was already well established by 1700, as were attempts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to suppress and control the game in the interests of labor discipline and puritan ideology (90, 138–45). Adrian Harvey notes an 1899 magazine account of a late eighteenth-century match between Norfolk and Suffolk, truly remarkable in its savagery, in which nine players were killed (53).5 The struggle over the socially sanctioned practices, emotions, and morality for which football has provided a focus has clearly been long and bitter. Among the constants has been the irrefutable passion demonstrated for the game by white working-class men, which was not diminished by public school codification or the attempt to incorporate into the game the cult of the aristocratic gentleman.6 The obsession among working-class men with playing and watching the game around the time of its professionalization in 1863 can be explained in part as linked to the pursuit of leisure (Cunningham 128–29)7 and to the desire for “symbolic citizenship” within a specific subculture (Holt 172). At the same time, the game also afforded a space in which to produce specific masculine values that would then reflect back a desired image of a male working-class ethos: “In a way football was like a saga where skill and cunning were valued, but hard-ness, stamina, courage, and loyalty were even more important. Fairness and good manners were not held in high regard” (Holt 173).8 The masculine preoccupation with playing and watching football reminds us that the social definition of sport has itself been a central site of class conflict and negotiation, “part of the larger field of struggles over the definition of the legitimate use of the body” (Bourdieu 360). In the mid-1990s world of English football that King’s work explores, this body finds itself pulled in opposite directions by the often irreconcilable forces of nationalism, masculinity, and progressive, liberal modernity. Officially identified

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as a social problem, the football hooligan takes refuge in a communal reconstruc-tion of history deeply implicated in highly conservative definitions of masculinity and nation.

In conflict here are different histories—official and unofficial—of the football hooligan. In the official version, violent crowd behavior at professional matches can be traced back to at least the late nineteenth century, when “roughs” were regularly reported as causing trouble at matches in the game’s early years.9 Between the wars, football generally became more respectable, and crowd prob-lems diminished, although they did not disappear. It was not until the 1960s that the media coverage of football began to once more regularly report hooliganism at matches and hooligans became recognized by government and the media as a serious problem. The violence associated with the game coincided with a general sense of “moral panic” about the behavior of young people; this was sparked by rising juvenile crime rates, uncertainty about the future, the emergence of a number of threatening national youth styles, and racial tensions (Cohen passim; Williams 165–66). In this climate, football became increasingly identified as a venue at which fights and other kinds of disorder regularly occurred. It was around this time, too, that football violence in England began to take on the more cohesive and organized aspect associated with the phenomenon during the late twentieth century, with the performances of the fans often overshadowing those of the players on the field.

The official narrative of English football hooliganism also takes into account its place on the international, largely European, stage. Though hooliganism has been identified in other countries, England’s long history of football spectator violence sets it apart from what is generally considered a postwar phenomenon elsewhere in Europe. Some even judge it ironically as one of the few successful English exports during the economically lackluster 1970s and ’80s (Williams 161). Further, English hooliganism in particular is regarded as providing the chief catalyst for organized mayhem; there were few significant incidents of violence at international matches during the 1970s and ’80s that did not involve the English. Finally, and most importantly for this essay, English hooliganism is strongly linked to nationalism, with long-established and bitter domestic rivalries temporarily giving way during international play to a shared passionate loyalty to the national team, England.

The activities and stories of the hooligan as they unfold around the perfor-mance and spectacle of the English team abroad are given an unofficial but discriminating representation in England Away. Yet King too evokes official history in his portrayal of characters and events, drawing clear parallels between individual and national identities. As Stephen Wagg points out, the 1950s saw the popular, “sensationalist” press increasingly read the English football team as a metaphor for England itself. As Britain declined economically, shed its empire, and was forced to confront its diminished position in a new world order, the media began to view the nation itself (and here “Britain” and “England” become

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dangerously interchangeable) as betrayed by the continued failure of the English team on the international field: “Fleet Street spoke as if a still great nation was being betrayed by the bunglers and shirkers who ran, or were, its football team” (Wagg 222).10 Followers of the England side seemed particularly unwilling to accept the country’s new global position: beaten by “minor” football nations and economically outstripped by emerging nations and defeated war enemies. Their resentment and denial was further fueled in the 1980s by the nationalist fervor of Thatcherism, which attempted to ensure the government’s political survival with revived images of empire and military victory in the Falklands. Hooligan support for England at away games became a kind of defensive patriotism in the face of a wider national decline.11 A performative manliness—a particular, historically grounded form of identity built around notions of masculine authenticity and the ridicule of others for their perceived lack of toughness—became inextricably associated with a deeply insecure and highly aggressive national identity.

In England Away, King acknowledges football and English hooliganism as a social space within which significant numbers of young (and sometimes not-so-young) English working-class men define and perform versions of masculinity within the broader discourse of national identity. His characters present them-selves as affiliated with “England”: a united, homogeneous entity, the kind of coherent, Thatcherite nation that defines itself against other (largely European) national identities. By having a number of his characters follow England to the continent (for a football match that is, ironically but fittingly, never seen or described in the novel) and juxtaposing this incursion with other characters’ memories and accounts of war, King situates the hooligans’ words and actions within a broader historical context that clearly suggests a connection between football and the defense and assertion of national identity through violent conflict. As Silvia Mergenthal suggests, the English footballers and their supporters— as certified members of the “bulldog breed,” with their willingness to sacrifice themselves for Queen and nation—are associated in this social and cultural nar-rative with war heroes (264). In each case, aggression, strength, courage, and endurance are seen within the community as natural and inherent qualities of a masculinity that is deeply bound up with nationhood.

England Away complicates such nationalist assumptions and mythological correspondences by remaining sensitive to the hooligan community and culture as heterogeneous, with members capable of varied and at times complex respons-es to questions of individual and national identity. Refusing to shy away from the violence, sexism, and racism inherent in hooligan culture, King nevertheless aims for a nuanced account of its place within the broader society. He achieves this largely through voice and narrative structure. By offering access to the con-sciousness of two England supporters on the trip to Europe and a World War II veteran as he makes his way through a single day in London, King foregrounds the ambivalence that underlies both the senseless violence and the apparent heroism that superficially governs and defines these narratives. By gradually

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weaving increasingly closer stylistic and thematic threads between the seem-ingly disconnected, disparate stories, the novel eventually suggests something like redemption for the hooligan, although the validity of such a resolution is immediately questionable.

The novel’s multiple narratives provide various perspectives on the relation-ship between individual and national identities. For Tommy Johnson, a young England supporter, the trip to the continent for the football match presents an opportunity to reinscribe and reaffirm English dominance in Europe:

There’s different kinds of holidays. Different away days. Different ways to go. Following England is all about pride and history. Our place in the pecking order. For centuries we’ve been kicking shit out of the Europeans. They start something and we finish it. We’re standing on the White Cliffs of Dover singing COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU’RE HARD ENOUGH. Waiting for the Germans to get the bottle together and cross the Channel. Fifty English will run two hundred or more Europeans no problem. A thousand if you’re talking Italians or Spanish. I’m proud to be English and proud to say so. (23)

Harry Roberts is an older and more weary hooligan, and although he is still implicated in the violence and aggression of his fellow supporters, which he justifies as a “natural” effect of unavoidable circumstances, he nonetheless anticipates his brief sojourn in Europe as a means of examining his own personal history and attempting to imagine different possibilities for himself:

It was hard for the England boys going across the Channel, and naturally they needed a drink to ease things along, and naturally people could get out of hand, and naturally the continental lagers were that bit stronger and fucked your head up, but it didn’t matter. Old rivalries came into the open and discipline was bound to go out the window. They were crossing the line and it was an emotional time, hanging on to the last link with home before they entered a strange, dangerous land, full of people who hated the English. Harry saw it differently, but then he liked Europe more than the others. He understood what the boys were going through and hoped they would relax in Amsterdam. Foreign travel helped broaden the mind and Harry couldn’t wait. (69)

Finally, the wartime recollections of Bill Farrell, the World War II veteran, vacil-late between reluctance and nostalgia, providing an explicit historical context for the expressions of violence and depictions of male community and friendship present in the other two narratives:

Farrell had played his part and was intensely proud of what he’d done. He’d gone across the Channel with the invasion force and helped defeat Hitler and the Nazis. Now he was back in the same old pubs. He didn’t mind at all. He was happy to sit in the Unity. [. . .] Of course he had his memories, but the strongest memories were often the ones you never shared. The history of the English working class was buried in coffins and burnt in incinerators. (31)

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Each of these characters quickly asserts his own distinct identity: Tommy, the violent, aggressive hooligan and young veteran of similar excursions, is respected within the community; Harry, the older, calmer man, seeks a broader perspective in which to situate himself after the recent murder of his best friend;12 Farrell, the retired and widowed ex-soldier, lives with his memories of death and destruction but remains unwilling to examine them too closely. Though at first glance they may resemble caricatures, these characters ultimately resist any easy interpreta-tion. Tommy often juxtaposes crass jingoism (“We can do whatever we fucking well want because we’re England and nothing can stop us” [93]) with a more thoughtful analysis of his position in society: “You watch a football game on the telly nowadays and every time the cameras look at the crowd they pin-point well-dressed women and kids. [. . .] The media is controlled by class” (91–92). Harry’s idyllic dreams of Europe on the ferry out of England do not prevent him from happily vomiting over the railing on the heads of a group of unsuspecting schoolgirls: “Yes, the English sense of humour was alive and well and doing the business on the high seas” (35). Farrell eventually reveals a complicated, check-ered past that he has long attempted to suppress: “There were so many impres-sions and sights he’d pushed down, applying a gloss finish. It was the only way to survive such a thing” (40).

King explores these characters and the masculine communities they inhabit by focusing on the definition and construction of both individual and national identities through memory and story. In his study of the relationship between collective memory and football hooliganism, Anthony King calls attention to the way in which the “collective memory of violence,” established in discus-sions between group members, affirms the solidarity of these groups (568). “The dominance of collective memory over individual memory is not simply a matter of political expediency,” King writes. “Individual memories are ontologi-cally susceptible to re-interpretation in line with emergent collective accounts because memories exist only at the level of the imagination. [. . .] Memories do not remain pristine, therefore, but undergo permanent transformation as they are drawn upon in different ways in alternative circumstances” (581). In England Away, this “memory of violence,” as continually reconstituted by the stories the characters tell each other and themselves, is crucial in defining the boundaries and ethos of both the masculine community and the nation. Thus, Tommy and Harry, as part of the English football expeditionary force, engage in a constant nostalgic exchange of anecdotes about past altercations and clashes with other hooligan gangs both in England and abroad. The result is a kind of collaborative text, always subject to change, that feeds and is fed by individual narratives. Farrell, too, within his own smaller community, finds himself part of a similar process of memory and storymaking. Finally accepting a long-standing invita-tion to reunite with some old veterans, Farrell spends the evening attempting to recreate the past and, in so doing, affirms a sense of order and coherence in his life. As he says:

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I believe we did what had to be done and compared to the Germans and the Russians we were decent and honest. I sit between Eddie and Barry. These two and Ted are good, decent men. They all have their experiences and their lives after the war. It is the same for me and for Dave Horning. I think of the men I killed now because I have had it all laid out in some kind of formation. I have thought about what we did and it makes sense. (192–93)

Such stories serve to reassert and reaffirm a largely untroubled member-ship within a set of shared masculine values. Yet the collective, collaborative text becomes more uncertain when individual stories are no longer capable of attaching themselves to the accepted, communal narrative. Harry grows weary of the usual exchange of hooligan tales of violence, and his unusual encounter in Amsterdam with Nicky, a young prostitute, distances him further from the group, allowing him to exchange one masculine fantasy for another. Although he is never truly alienated from the rest of the English, he does not take part in the organized violence when it comes, and when he reaches Berlin, it is clear that he is beginning to live within different stories and to construct different memories: “Harry tapped his foot and sipped his lager, relaxed and calm, Nicky in her right place and at peace with the world, getting into the European state of mind, loving every minute of his time on the Continent without any kind of media propaganda, doing his own thing, loving everything he saw” (230).

Because Harry’s apparent transformation is foreshadowed from the beginning of the novel, passages like this are not surprising. Perhaps because of his change, Harry’s voice becomes less pronounced near the end, appearing in the text less often, usurped within the book’s structure by those of Tommy and Farrell. In many ways, these two function throughout the text as direct opposites, yet gradu-ally their narratives begin to connect. Though they never meet and are never even dimly aware of each other’s existence, they nevertheless provide the novel with its most significant encounter.

It becomes increasingly clear that Farrell is haunted by a specific violent act in his past. Although King offers vague glimpses of this throughout the book, it is articulated fully only during his reunion with the old soldiers when, in the midst of otherwise sentimental reminiscences, Farrell is finally able to recount the event as a coherent narrative (even if only to himself):

I saw the German youth crawling and his gun was in his hand. Maybe he was trying to turn, maybe not. I’d killed before and I could have kicked the gun away, but I couldn’t be bothered. [. . .] I was only a kid myself and I’d seen too much, and when the boy moved I didn’t try to think. My brain was heavy and maybe I was insane. I shot him in the head and blew his head open. I shattered his skull with the crack of my bullets. I don’t know how many shots I fired but I didn’t need them all. I stuck my bayonet into him as well, but by then he had to be dead. I dug it in ten or more times. I killed a boy younger than myself and he stayed in the mud as I moved forward. [. . .] When I see war veterans on the television meeting old enemies and shaking hands I wonder what it would be like to meet that boy all grown up with a

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wife and children and grandchildren of his own. What would it be like to have a drink with him in a German beer garden? I would be embarrassed and turn my head away when he thanked me for his life. (280)

Farrell’s reconstruction of the brutal killing of the young German soldier and his imagining a happier alternative ending are juxtaposed near the end of the novel with Tommy’s reaction, during the much anticipated street battle with the German fans in Berlin, to the beating of a young German supporter by two English fans:

The youth’s taking a hammering from a couple of Englishmen. He’s wrig-gling on the concrete and covering himself. [. . .] We’re a democratic people. This German decided to have a go at the famous English football hooligans and he’s lost out. [. . .] Face in the gutter getting the shit kicked out of him by a couple of men ten years older. The bigger of the two hovers around him, stamping on the youth’s head. He’s deliberate in what he’s doing. He wants to hurt this boy. He’s trying to crack the skull. Damage that fucking Kraut brain. That fucking German cunt responsible for bombing London and Coventry and Plymouth. [. . .] I walk towards them and hit the one stamping on the German’s head. I punch him in the face and I punch him hard. It’s a good punch. There’s no panic or excitement, but I want to break his nose. [. . .] The second man turns round and says they’re English. Thinks I’ve got them mixed up with the Krauts. I tell him to fuck off and kick him in the balls. (277)

Shocked by the fact of one Englishman abroad attacking another, the hooligans do as they are told, leaving Tommy to look after the German youth. In a scene that resembles events as they may have played themselves out in Farrell’s alter-native story of the German soldier, Tommy pulls the German boy to his feet, allowing the youth to lean into him as Tommy supports him against the wall: “I think he’s going to be sick, but nothing happens. There’s the blood but it’s just his nose. Nothing serious. Fuck knows if they’ve done his bones or something internal. He stands up, looking better. Starts to say something, but I shake my head, frown and turn away. I jog down the road to catch up with Mark, Carter and the rest of the boys” (279).

Tommy’s awkward self-consciousness at the end of this passage echoes Farrell’s imagined embarrassment when he is thanked for saving the German soldier’s life. There is a suggestion here, then, that Tommy’s atypical act of kindness in the street, even if occasioned by shame and guilt, redeems Farrell’s uncharacteristic act of violence in the battlefield by saving a life in exchange for the one that had been taken. The juxtaposition of these two incidents, suggesting the redemption of the English war hero by the football hooligan, complicates both past and present, as the cultural narratives that define each character and his respective community prove to be both ambivalent and contradictory. Yet such redemption, if it is that, is significantly compromised. First, in the chronology of events as presented in the text, Tommy’s rescue of the German youth actually

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precedes Farrell’s detailed account of the death of the German soldier; thus it is the surprising violence of the latter, not the unexpected kindness of the former, that haunts the reader. Second, and more important, the pronounced sentimen-tality inherent in Farrell’s imagined and Tommy’s actual stereotypically manly insistence on awkward silence as the only appropriate response to their actions marks them as still subject to conventional masculine practices and identities. Farrell and Tommy can move beyond the restrictions of one kind of masculin-ist narrative only by situating themselves within the disciplinary constraints of another; national identity and feeling are articulated as a product of theatrical sentiment and senseless violence.

Only two short passages follow Farrell’s recollection of the soldier’s death before the novel ends. The first reveals Harry’s hope for a future with Nicky, the Dutch prostitute: “He would go and see her in Amsterdam. He smiled as he pictured Nicky opening the door of her flat and throwing her thin arms around his neck” (281). The book’s final paragraph shows us Tommy once more: “There’s some Germans further down the street. As we get nearer, they move forward and we pile in, punching and kicking the ones at the front. [. . .] Battering the fuck out of anyone who wants to have a go. We’re proud to be English and proud of our culture. We’re doing the stroppy cunts once and for all” (282). Harry’s imag-ined reunion with Nicky is so romanticized, in fact such a banal male fantasy, that it places Harry himself in danger of pathetic self-parody. And Tommy’s final words, the final words of the novel, situate us once more in the midst of another fantasy: violence as the ultimate definition of a specifically masculine nation. Yet for all the misogynist romanticism inherent in Harry’s dreams, King still insists on the affective force of his desires, preventing us from mocking them too eas-ily. Similarly, Tommy’s recent act of selfless generosity, however much it might merely exchange one conventional manly performance for another, nevertheless complicates the aggression and brutality of his nationalist narrative.

England Away’s portrayal of hooligan culture, as it defines itself against both its continental Other and its own nationalist past, encouraged by chants from the stands of “two world wars and one World Cup” (49), anticipates Paul Gilroy’s reminder that “the nations which triumphed in 1918 and 1945 live on somewhere unseen, but palpable” (119). King’s novel provides the conflicting and conflicted voices of a contentious national identity that many within England would prefer to dismiss as a misguided, nostalgic, desperate attempt to cling to a glorious past that in fact never existed. As what could be loosely called a “football novel,” England Away may be seen as taking its place among those narratives that come to compose the kind of collective memory discussed by Anthony King as instru-mental in defining and reconstituting football hooligan culture. However, if this is the work that the novel performs, it also introduces a much more unstable definition of masculine identity and desire within this particular community. Acknowledging that football in England has long provided a fertile source of empowering local myths, all the more effective when they gain purchase within

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the national imagination, John King in England Away troubles any easy response to or definition of “hooligan” as a social and cultural category, the fractious fig-ure of the hooligan itself embodying the complications inherent in any attempt to assert English distinctiveness in the wake of the loss of empire.

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

NOTES

1. John H. Kerr defines the figure of the hooligan thus: “The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary describes a hooligan as ‘a disorderly and noisy young person who often behaves in a violent and destructive way; young thug or ruffian.’ The word hooligan has been qualified by the addition of ‘soccer’ or ‘football’ because during the past thirty years the hooligan acts have generally taken place in and around English soccer matches. The words ‘in and around’ are used because the hooligan acts often have little to do with what is going on during the game and frequently occur outside or well away from the soccer stadium” (5). John Williams adds: “For a lot of non-football fans—and even for many who do support the game—hooliganism has become dangerously close to being the national sport’s key defining characteristic for the past 25 years” (161).

2. King has been both panned and lauded by reviewers: he is attacked for what is seen as his uncritical adherence to “lad-lit,” with its interest in young heterosexual men “on the make” and its accompanying disregard of women, and he is admired for his unflinching look at underclass culture. Writing for Spike Magazine, Jayne Margetts calls King “Nick Hornby on steroids” and describes his novels as “filled with the testosterone of too much lager, violence, machismo and the British working- class ethic.” Yet she admits to finding herself “thoroughly addicted to every word that he writes” and calls him “England’s answer to Irvine Welsh” (here presumably meant as a compliment).

3. Other examples of this genre include Chris Pennant and Micky Smith’s Want Some Aggro (2002) and For the Claret and Blue (2004); Shaun Tordoff’s City Psychos (2002); and Dougie Brim-son’s Eurotrashed (2003) and The Crew (2001). Of interest here is also Among the Thugs (1991) by Bill Buford, the founding editor of Granta magazine and later the fiction editor for the New Yorker. Among the Thugs is a highly compelling and sometimes disturbing account of Buford’s years spent accompanying fans of Manchester United around England and on the continent.

4. Reliable biographical information on King is notoriously scarce, though rumors abound. One of these has King as a former member of the Headhunters, the infamous hooligan “firm” that sup-ports Chelsea’s football club. The firm provides the title for King’s second novel, and some of the characters in England Away belong to it.

5. For an account of the more recent history of football hooliganism in the United Kingdom, see Murphy, Williams, and Dunning, especially their chapter 4, “Football Hooliganism in Britain: 1880–1989.” In Among the Thugs, Buford quotes as a chapter epigraph the following account from the October 30, 1890, edition of the Times:

What are we to do with the “Hooligan”? Who or what is responsible for his growth? [. . .] Our “Hooligans” go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the “Hooligan” is a hideous excrescence on our civilization. (24)

6. The more recent gentrification of the sport under New Labour, which has included rising prices and the elimination of terraces (standing-room-only sections) at stadiums, and which has in some

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cases replaced working-class affiliations with a middle-class ethos, is also alluded to in England Away.

7. Hugh Cunningham remarks on the middle class’s sponsorship of this pursuit of leisure in an attempt to achieve a better understanding between the classes: “They failed to realise that working-class people approached these recreational occasions without any such objective. They wanted simply to enjoy what was being offered and as soon as financial constraints allowed they shook off what they perceived as heavy-handed patronage” (129).

8. See also John Hargreaves: “Working-class people stamped sports like association football and rugby league with their own character and transformed them in some ways into a means of expres-sion for values opposed to the bourgeois athleticist tradition: vociferous partisanship, a premium on victory, a suspicion of and often a disdain for constituted authority, a lack of veneration for official rules, mutual solidarity as the basis of team-work, a preference for tangible monetary rewards for effort and a hedonistic ‘vulgar’ festive element, were all brought to sports. Disorder around football, later to be labelled ‘football hooliganism’ was also not unknown at this time” (67).

9. See Dunning, Murphy, and Williams (71–95 passim). 10. Silvia Mergenthal calls attention to the way football support in the 1950s shifted from a

“locally-based club phenomenon” to take on broader national identifications. Following a number of historians and sociologists (see, for example, Holt and Mason), Mergenthal explains this heightened nationalism in the sport as a reaction to historical events that threatened British prestige: the Suez Crisis of 1956, decolonization in Africa, the diminished role of Great Britain in the Cold War, and de Gaulle’s veto of British membership in the EEC (Mergenthal 262). 11. King’s novels highlight the inherent racism in such nationalist sentiments, fueled by Thatch-

erism’s ambiguous relationship to the xenophobic statements and actions of such figures as Enoch Powell and representatives of the National Front. In England Away, Tommy complains about being labeled a Nazi by the media: “We’re patriotic Englishmen and that’s the truth. Some of the blokes on this ferry might not particularly like blacks and Pakis, but if you’re white and working class then you’re automatically labeled scum by the likes of the Anti-Nazi League. Being patriotic doesn’t mean we follow an Austrian. Our pride is in our history and culture” (44–45). 12. This incident features in King’s earlier novel Headhunters.

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.com/newreview/johnkinginterview.html>. 6 Nov. 2006.Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: Paladin, 1973.Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c. 1780–1880. London: Croom Helm,

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CONTRIBUTORS

Flore Chevaillier currently teaches composition and literature classes at the Uni-versity of Dayton. She received her PhD from Florida State University. Her research projects have focused on contemporary American fiction and French theory. Some of her previous scholarship has appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, European Journal of American Studies, Electronic Book Review, and Sources.

Aaron Chandler teaches at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently completing a book-length study of the legacy of sentimentalism in post–Cold War American literature.

Miguel Mota is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He has published on Malcolm Lowry, Jeanette Winterson, Mike Leigh, Derek Jarman, and others. His book Invisible Texts: The Screenplay in Print Culture is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.

Fiona Tolan is a lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. Her main research interests are in contemporary literature, particularly British and Canadian fiction, and the history of second-wave feminism. She is author of Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Rodopi, 2007) and co-editor of Writers Talk: Conversations With Contemporary British Novelists (Continuum, 2008). She is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Victoria Stewart is a senior lecturer in the School of English, University of Leicester, United Kingdom. She has published widely on twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing and is the author of Women’s Autobiography: War and Trauma (Palgrave, 2003) and Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (Palgrave, 2006).

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