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Chronicled from the perspective of a fanatical youngster, through disillusioned adolescence, to an adult "who should know better", the author - an Arsenal fan - examines the absurdities and traumas of everyday life and football. Combines anecdote with a wider commentary on the state of the game.
'A spanking 7-0 away win of a football book....inventive, honest, funny, heroic, charming'
''Whether you are interested in football or not, this is tears-running-down-your-face funny, read-bits-out-loud-to-complete-strangers funny, but also highly perceptive and honest about Hornby's obsession and the state of the game. Fever Pitch is not only the best football book ever written, it's the funniest book of the year'
'An absolutely marvellous book'
I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically. And on my first visit to Selhurst Park with my friend Frog, I saw a dead body, still my first, and learned a little bit about, well, life itself. As we walked towards the railway station after the game, we saw the man lying in the road, partially covered by a raincoat, a purple-and-blue Palace scarf around his neck. Another younger man was crouched over him, and the two of us crossed the road and went to have a look. 'Is he all right?' Frog asked. The man shook his head. 'No. Dead. I was just walking behind him and he keeled over.' He looked dead. He was grey and, as far as we were concerned, unimaginably motionless. We were impressed. Frog sensed a story that would interest not only the fourth year but much of the fifth as well. 'Who done him? Scousers?' At this point the man lost patience. 'No. He's had a heart attack, you little prats. Now fuck off.' And we did, and that was the end of the incident. But it has never been very far away from me since then, my one and only image of death; it is an image which instructs. The Palace scarf, a banal and homely detail; the timing (after the game, but mid-season), the stranger paying distressed but ultimately detached attention. And, of course, the two idiotic teenagers gawping at a tiny tragedy with unembarrassed fascination, even glee. It worries me, the prospect of dying in mid-season like that, but of course, in all probability I will die sometime between August and May. We have the naive expectation that when we go, we won't be leaving any loose ends lying around: we will have made our peace with our children, left them happy and stable, and we will have achieved more or less everything that we wanted to with our lives. It's all nonsense, of course, and football fans contemplating their own mortality know that it is all nonsense. There will be hundreds of loose ends. Maybe we will die the night before our team appears at Wembley, or the day after a European Cup first-leg match, or in the middle of a promotion campaign or a relegation battle, and there is every prospect, according to many theories about the afterlife, that we will not be able to discover the eventual outcome. The whole point about death, metaphorically speaking, is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded. The man lying on the pavement would not, as Frog observed on the way home, discover whether Palace stayed up or not that season; nor that they would continue to bob up and down between the divisions over the next twenty years, that they would change their colours half a dozen times, that they would eventually reach their first FA Cup Final, or that they would end up running around with the legend 'VIRGIN' plastered all over their shirts. That's life, though. I do not wish to die in mid-season but, on the other hand, I am one of those who would, I think, be happy to have my ashes scattered over the Highbury pitch (although I understand that there are restrictions: too many widows contact the club, and there are fears that the turf would not respond kindly to the contents of urn after urn). It would be nice to think that I could hang around inside the stadium in some form, and watch the first team one Saturday, the reserves the next; I would like to feel that my children and grandchildren will be Arsenal fans and that I could watch with them. It doesn't seem a bad way to spend eternity, and certainly I'd rather be sprinkled over the East Stand than dumped into the Atlantic or left up some mountain.
Penguin.co.uk: What were the circumstances surrounding the writing of Fever Pitch? NH: I hoped it would chime with people who followed a team seriously. I suspect that anyone who writes a book has two levels of ambition - the modest and the grandiose. I saw no reason why the book shouldn't appeal to lots of people, of different ages and genders and class. But of course you never seriously think that they're actually going to buy it! P: In the book you do talk a bit about how football has been a kind of glue with people. Tell us something about your teaching experience and the way you related to the kids through popular culture. NH: I have always listened to a lot of pop music and I have always watched football, so you think, how hard can this be? But of course kids just presume that you know nothing about what they're interested in, and even if you do know something you start to feel kind of phoney. I can remember when I was on teaching practice, saying to this kid "I'm an Arsenal fan", and he just looked at me with complete contempt, as if my job automatically ruled me out from being able to go. P: I suppose kids do want to feel that there is territory that is theirs, and they just don't want adults coming into it. NH: There was a clear generation gap between me and my parents, and really in the last twenty or thirty years there are two or three generations that have grown up completely within popular culture. So you're listening to the same stuff as your kids, which I think must be quite uncomfortable for them. P: There are quite a lot of class issues in Fever Pitch that are both buried but also rather explicitly dealt with. NH: There's been this thing, probably ever since Fever Pitch, about how the middle classes have colonised football and that this is a completely new phenomena. I think if you were middle class you were certainly aware of it in football stadiums in the seventies, but I can remember talking to Tony Parsons about it, and he said "Who do they think has been sitting up in those seats for the last sixty years?" I think that the media tries to re-invent problems every 5 or 6 years and I think they've probably always been within football. But I think the class issue was important to address in Fever Pitch in a way that it wasn't in High Fidelity. THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY Tony Lacey, Nick Hornby's current editor, confesses his top editorial mistake of all time - turning down Fever Pitch… Every publisher who's been doing the job for a decent spell is bound to have skeletons in his cupboard; the wrong decisions that still make you wince in the middle of the night. After the initial pain I tend not to be overly bothered by the books that didn't sell or weren't critically admired - it's easy to tell yourself that the public or the critics were just plain wrong, and that history is littered with great books that had a rough ride at first. It's the ones that got away that continue to hurt. I once told an agent who had rejected my offer that the book he was selling was "a piece of American whimsy"; I now think, and perhaps even thought then, that it is an American masterpiece. Fever Pitch comes firmly into this category. Penguin were the runners-up in the auction, which was concluded at a not-very-high price. The puzzle, ten years later, is why on earth we didn't go the full distance. It's a book for which I'm the ideal reader - I can still remember the thrilling shock of recognition when I read it later as a finished book, that feeling which is rare but wonderful when you get it from a book, that it was describing something of my life to me in ways I hadn't read before. So why didn't we? A fellow publisher once said to me that he thought publishers subconsciously found it difficult to publish books they really, truly loved. It's a weird, almost charming thought, but I don't really believe it. I guess the real reason is down to a terrible old publishing cliché - believe it or not, and it's hard to now, there was a general belief that football books didn't sell. Never mind that there was a burgeoning generation of male readers who'd grown up on football; never mind that anyway the book was really about families, and adolescence, and class, and ... well, a lot of things besides football: football books, it was said, just didn't sell. But even here there's a puzzle: my very first acquisition as an editor when I came into publishing in the 70s had been Eamon Dunphy's Only a Game?, a now-classic account (still in print in Penguin), of playing the professional game. So I knew football books could sell, and I had already taken the professional plunge... I guess there's no point in picking over old bones. The book was published fantastically well by Gollancz, and became a huge bestseller as I watched with envious admiration. But there's an odd coda to the story. After the publication of Fever Pitch, Gollancz and Penguin jointly commissioned Nick to write a book about the American World Cup. The idea was that he would follow England's fortunes around the States. Like Fever Pitch, of course it was to be about other things besides football - how would someone who'd grown up with American culture through music, films and books react to the reality of the country itself? Unfortunately, England failed to qualify (I have an irrational dislike of Graham Taylor to this day, way beyond that felt by millions of other Englishmen who suffered with me) and the book was called off. It seemed pretty clear that we were fated not to publish Nick Hornby. Imagine my misery when the then marketing director of Waterstones, John Mitchison, pressed a proof copy of High Fidelity on me, and I discovered it was a masterpiece: original, funny, true, defining of a generation, and so on - all those things you read about in blurbs but usually turn out not to be true. Top five mistakes of all time: Fever Pitch, No. 1 every time.
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