I don’t like football.
There, I’ve admitted it. I tend to be the person looking around confused in a pub after a team scores. It has, unfortunately, separated me slightly from some of my football loving friends. Given all that, I don’t really read football literature.
The good thing about this book, for me anyway, is that football, whilst instigating events and being vitally important to some characters, is not what it’s really about. The meat of the book is in human interaction and in coping with a tragedy.
Set in Belgium, the story recounts a fictional testimony of the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster in which thirty nine people lost their lives. We meet disparate groups from various parts of Europe whose live cross on that fateful day. Leaping from mind to mind, we see the events unfold from behind their eyes.
The actual disaster takes up a surprisingly small amount of the novel. After this, the book is filled with reactions to the event; the guilt, shame and sorrow that possesses the individuals involved.
The book is written in pure ‘stream of consciousness’. Nothing is witnessed except from a characters viewpoint. This serves to heighten the emotional tone of the book, but left me feeling that it lacked a solid, neutral anchor to base passages upon. It didn’t help that there was no identification of the character when the story switched perspective; it’s up to the reader to figure out the individual in question by the tone, thoughts and verbal clues.
On the whole…not a bad choice for my one and only foray into the football world. I did find some passages very compelling and, with a few exceptions (perhaps explainable by the translation) found the writing to be both cleverly done and enjoyable. My two major complaints are the aforementioned viewpoint confusion and the occasional information overload. I felt sometimes overwhelmed by the amount of information given through a persons’ thoughts and felt that a great amount of this could have been removed with little impact on the story.
Oh, and thirdly, there was a lot of football.
Rating: 
