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Q: WILL THERE EVER BE A SEQUEL TO FEVER PITCH, A BOOK WHICH COVERS ARSENAL’S SUCCESS IN THE LAST FEW YEARS?
A: I wouldn’t want to write one. Sequels are very rarely a good idea, and in any case, the success of the book changed my relationship with the club in some ways. When I wrote Fever Pitch, I felt that I could represent the typical fan, but the success of the book changed my relationship with the club. I’ve met a number of the players, and got to know many of the staff at Arsenal…I don’t think I could write with the same perspective, and the perspective was very important to the original.
Q: HAS FOOTBALL CHANGED SINCE YOU WROTE FEVER PITCH? AND CAN YOU REALLY IDENTIFY WITH A TEAM FULL OF FRENCH AND BRAZILIAN PLAYERS IN THE SAME WAY THAT YOU COULD WHEN IT WAS AN ALL- BRITISH SIDE?
A: I think more has changed in the thirteen years since the book came out than in the previous hundred. Even at the beginning of the 90s people in England stood on the terraces to watch British players who would almost certainly need a job of some kind when they retired. Now we sit down to watch mostly foreign players who couldn’t possibly get through the money they earn. And we hardly need ever go to the stadium to watch every game live, because they’re all on TV. Many of these changes haven’t been for the better. But Arsenal fans are probably in two minds about it all, because the last decade has been the best of our lifetimes. We’ve seen fantastic football, and we’ve seen our team win a lot of trophies.
I’ve never really understood the argument about foreign players. Of course a player like Tony Adams, who was relatively local, came through the youth team and stayed with the club throughout his career, is always going to be special to the fans. But Charlie Nicholas wasn’t local, and neither were Lee Dixon or Nigel Winterburn, who’d played for loads of different clubs. Lee Dixon was a Manchester City supporter who became a key Arsenal player simply because of his commitment to the club. And if he can find it, then why not Henry or Vieira? Dennis Bergkamp has already played a lot more games than Charlie George ever managed - Charlie George was a local boy who only stayed for a couple of years. It’s the transfer system that’s the problem, not the influx of foreign players, and the transfer system has always been with us, and will always be with us.
Q: ARE THERE ANY GOOD BOOKS ABOUT FOOTBALL THAT YOU CAN RECOMMEND?
A: Pete Davies' All Played Out, which is about the 1990 World Cup and certainly helped me get Fever Pitch published; Eamon Dunphy's Only A Game?, which is the diary of a so-so professional footballer, and gave insights that most of those player books don't; Hunter Davies' The Glory Game - a year spent on the inside of a club, and I'd love a club to be brave enough to give someone similar access now; and Simon Kuper's Football Against the Enemy.
I've never particularly wanted to read a football novel. Like most football fans, I suspect, I wouldn't believe in a Melchester Rovers, nor in a player I'd never heard of. And I'm not sure what the POINT of such a book would be. Real-life sport already contains all the themes and narratives you could want.
Q: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE FILMS OF YOUR BOOKS? HOW MUCH CONTROL DO YOU HAVE? AND WASN’T IT STRANGE TO SEE HIGH FIDELITY MOVED TO CHICAGO?
A: I’ve been very lucky with all my adaptations - they were made by intelligent people who liked the books, and I know that not all authors feel this way. I have made many friends, and have always felt included by the film-makers. But films are a very different medium - for a start, films are much shorter than books, so you have to make enormous cuts and compressions. I reckon 75% at least of a book has to be omitted from the screen version, and there’s no point in agonizing about this once you’ve taken the money. I think it’s a mistake to think that you can control anything. Films are a collaborative medium, and even if you ask for approvals over director and cast and screenwriter, none of this counts for anything if the director appoints a bad cinematographer, or editor, or even designer. Or a good actor turns out to be wrong for the part, and so on, ad infinitum. You have to presume that professional people know what they’re doing, and I simply don’t know enough about the medium to start trying to tell people how they should do their job. On top of that, I’m pretty sick of working on the books by the time they’re published. I’d rather get on with something new while I still have the ideas.
I didn’t mind High Fidelity being set in Chicago at all. The people who adapted the film, including John Cusack, grew up there, so it became the best sort of adaptation in the sense that it was personally meaningful to the people doing the work. I liked the way they changed the references to reflect their Rob rather than mine, for example - theirs belonged to a slightly different generation, listened to slightly different music. I never thought it was a book about North London anyway. There are guys like that in cities all over the world.
Q: HOW AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ARE YOUR BOOKS? WAS WILL IN ABOUT A BOY BASED ON YOU IN ANY WAY, FOR EXAMPLE?
A: Fever Pitch was obviously and entirely autobiographical. As for the rest - well, it depends on what you mean by autobiographical. Some people ask me which record shop I worked in, or which shop High Fidelity was based on, and I have never worked in a record shop, and I made Championship Vinyl up. There are lots of shops like it, and I’ve been in some of them, but it’s never been a matter of simply changing the names. Rob likes some of the same music that I do, but I think I like more than he does, and he doesn’t really listen to much new stuff - he’s sort of losing interest a bit, because that fitted in better with the tone of the book: he’s in a nostalgic, regretful frame of mind. And all the narrative incidents are fictional. I think with many of the books, I’ve ended up dramatizing a mood or state of mind I’ve experienced, so they’re not straightforwardly, literally autobiographical.
Neither Will nor Marcus in About A Boy are in any way me, though. Will came about because I’d been looking at men’s glossy magazines and trying to imagine the kind of person these magazines were addressing. I didn’t know anyone with the kind of income, or interest in personal grooming, or the apparent lack of domestic ties that you seemed to need to be a GQ reader. And Marcus , who was very very loosely based on someone I used to teach, was as far removed from potential GQ-ishness as I could imagine - he’s nerdy, badly-dressed, uncool, and came with all this messy emotional baggage. I fitted in at school - I liked football and the right sort of music and so on - but Marcus doesn’t and can’t. He learns to, but he’s lost something of himself in doing so.
Q: WHICH WRITERS HAVE INFLUENCED YOU?
A: The people who made me want to write were Anne Tyler, Lorrie Moore and Roddy Doyle: simplicity, humour, soul. And there's another American writer called David Gates, who’s written two fantastic novels, Jernigan and Preston Falls. I can’t believe that anyone who wants to write wouldn’t get something out of his stuff. If anyone wanted to know what was meant by ‘voice’, I’d point them in Gates’ direction. |
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