The tangled webs and interests of Joseph O'Neill
O'Neil's latest novel explores his love of soccer and weaves it into a narrative about colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade
I spent years covering soccer. I loved the “job” of covering my local Major League Soccer team for the local paper and other websites. It was exhausting.
At the time, there were few of us trying to cover the sport in a way that resembled what we were told to do in journalism school. For the most part, it was a lot of driving, little to no pay and a lack of oversight/understanding. I drove up and down the east coast to write about the New England Revolution for $300 a game story for the Boston Globe. I’d sleep in my car at rest stops on the way home because I couldn’t afford anything on a $300 trip to Philadelphia or New Jersey or Montreal (I’d pay to stay in Montreal because it’s Montreal and I’d justify the trip with some sightseeing). The local papers didn’t cover the sport and The Athletic didn’t exist. Blogs, like the one I started with some college friends, didn’t pay. Sometimes I’d get a chance to write something for some amazing magazine (thanks, George and Howler). Other times people looked at me like I was insane because soccer was a niche sport in America, still, and it didn’t have its American version of Ronaldo (the Brazilian one, the real one) or its own LeBron James. What was the point? And I’d argue about the sports merits as a game and how beautiful it is and also how it’s global—soccer reaches across countries and cultures. It’s a sport that has traversed the globe, becoming a giant life force that controlled calendars and schedules.
David Goldblatt examines the sport’s history in his monumental history of soccer The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer. He looks at how soccer moved from England, where its rules were formally organized, and proliferated out from the world’s biggest empire. Goldblatt’s effort is astounding in its breadth and understanding of not only the sport but also how it moved in part because an empire and colonialism. Soccer transcended and grabbed a hold of the world and it has become all encompassing and never ending. The teams (clubs) are worth billions. The players are some of the most famous people on the planet. Countries have decided the sport is the best way to wash and rinse their reputation. And the sport has succumb to its own version of colonialism as teams try to unearth talent from under represented countries and communities, hoping to find an edge on the competition while also using influence to take over various markets and the money that comes with that influence.
This is a long build up to Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, which is the story of Mark Wolfe, a thirty-something technical writer who is part of a co-op in Pittsburgh. Wolfe has an estranged family in London. His only contact with them comes from his wife, who speaks to his mother on the phone about their child. One day, Wolfe’s wife tells him to return his half-brother’s overtures and see what he needs and down a dark and winding path Wolfe goes into the underbelly of European soccer and the player agents who inhabit it in search of “Godwin” a mysterious player in Africa who has the potential to be as good as Lionel Messi, if only he had the proper agent to take his teenage talents along the best path to become that player. Because Wolfe’s life is in a low-moment after an issue at work, he goes on this insane journey, at the behest of his wife at first. Along the way, he meets a French talent scout named Lefebvre looking for his final big chance. The story unfolds in a serious of comedic incidents where Wolfe has to navigate his brother’s rudderless existence for it to come to a head with Lefebvre telling a Heart of Darkness style story of a man going into a place in search of another man, only to find out more about himself and the world he bargained for.
While Wolfe’s story unfolds, O’Neill brings in a second narrator to help ground the story in Pittsburgh. While Wolfe gives readers a direct connection, his co-worker At the co-op, Lakesha Williams offers readers another insight into the banality of life and work as well as a footing for the issues of human trafficking, the obsession with the next and sport, as well as the legacy of colonialism and the ugly history behind how people made money from trans-Atlantic trade.
Godwin is O’Neill’s first book in 10 years. His previous novel, The Dog, was long-listed for the Booker Prize. His book Netherland was also listed in 2008.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
How long have you been working on this idea? It seems like something you might've been working on for a while.
Well, I don't have many ideas for books. I'm not going to rush to write them down because then what am I going to do? To my horror, it seems like a decade has passed between my last novel and this, so I must've been thinking about it for at least that length of time. Certainly the soccer bit, the bit about Godwin, that plot. The Pittsburgh plot involving Lakeisha was relatively late in the process.
It kind of ties everything together, which is nice because, as an avid soccer fan, it's a hard sport to fictionalize and write about. It's not baseball or boxing, which have their own genres. Boxing is kind easy: Two people standing in a ring. You don't have a bunch of people to write about. And I've always thought about soccer, and who's going to make a great soccer movie? Who's going to make a great soccer book that isn't a nonfiction book about someone's love for a team? And here you have found a way to do it by not entirely writing about soccer.
The culture of soccer — or football — is not as verbal as that of baseball or cricket, where the players themselves spend a lot of time sitting around and just filling up time and chit-chatting. As a result of that, you have to pass the time in those sports. Whereas in soccer, it's very intense and your training has happened already, and your preparations for the game mean that you arrive, in theory, a kind of machine of football on the field, and you are there to almost act automatically once you are on the field. The other thing about soccer, of course, is that all the good players basically sacrifice every other kind of activity from the age of about 10 onwards, so it's not one of those sports where people concurrently go to college or concurrently do something else. They are absorbed by the game from an early age and so that for reason soccer players are notoriously inarticulate and also notoriously kind of… unthinking about their own game.
I think basketball is similar in the way it's played. It's fewer people than soccer but it's moving at all times —it's a blob of things going on at once — and each thing is organic, whereas baseball, cricket, and even golf or something like that, somebody IS doing something with someone else directly. Whereas the soccer field, the entire thing, is action and a great player doesn't actually have to do much to impact the game. He can stand. Messi wins a World Cup by standing around.
Very few people can stand around, but I know what you mean.
Zidane could stand around for a long time and then head-butt somebody or something. But I mean, that was not an uncommon occurrence. But there is something about that, right?
Well, there's no sort of measure in soccer, there's no sort of comment. It's similar in golf. You mentioned golf and I play now for better or for worse.
Are you ready to go out on the course?
Unfortunately, I've got to have knee operation next week. So I'm slightly hamstrung. Not hamstrung. I'm slightly out for the time being.
Golf is very technical. Lots of players often become coaches. They're interested in biomechanics. Tiger Woods is a very clever guy who can process a lot of information. He may not have a great range of interests, but there's no question that he's a smart guy. Whereas what's amazing about soccer is that I can be a top level soccer player in a very successful team for many, many years and when I'm put in front of the camera as a kind of commentator, I have no insight into the game. I'm just an idiot. And fans who watch games, as I do obsessively, are much more familiar with the other players, with what they're doing, with what's actually going on than these professionals. It's almost as if they've got no advantage at all. They've gained very little advantage from their years of being in the game.
It's also why they don't make great coaches. I always think the best player, Zidane was kind of a rare and great player and great coach.
Well, the jury is out on his coaching. I know that he was successful in the Champions League, but he was an old school kind of charisma with a very, very talented bunch of players. He wasn't very good in La Liga [as a coach] and has essentially retired at an early age. He's not a professional career coach like the others though.
Pep Guardiola was not as gifted or as talented as he was. You can see it and the way they played the position, they played the game. I think, for better players, one of the hard things is when a player can't do the thing they could do when you're their coach.
I agree. I coached my boys for many years at soccer, but I think at the top level, I think it's hard.
What I also found interesting was there's this almost Heart of Darkness like subplot, especially the way it's told. There's even skulls on the side of the road going and seeing it and going into this place that he calls hell. And I was like, this is a totally fascinating way to take on a sport and a story and just life in general, right? You're digging into the soul. So where did that all germinate and why Benin?
Well, Benin is interesting because it has a very interesting history, which is sort of mentioned by one of the two of the tourists who feature in the book. I went there and I traveled there for a while and saw various things there, made some friends there and all the rest of it. But it works. I wanted a very obscure place. For the book, it all happens by circumstance. I wasn't a Benin fanatic before I wrote this book. I didn't know anything about Benin, but I wanted a place where a truly exceptional, young talent could materialize, but at the same time disappear. I think somewhere in the book, for example, the coach says, looks like Godwin turned up not in Benin, but in Senegal…
or Cameroon or Nigeria…
Yes, those places have established scouting networks, more or less, and word would get out quickly. Whereas in Benin, particularly at the time in question by a wonderful coincidence for fictional purposes, the Benin soccer Championship had in fact collapsed. There was no professional soccer in Benin. It was, at that time, at least one of the world's least effective soccer countries. It was a kind of black hole of soccer, so it made the plot work.
Then, of course, I started off think about its history and of course it has this extraordinary and very awful history as a kind of slave kingdom. The thing about Benin, which is so different, is that it was not colonized directly until the late 19th century, when the kingdom collapsed because the abolition of the slave trade and then it was colonized by the French. Of course there were these trading posts there, and of course the colonial powers exerted enormous influence on the country, but it was a very unusual place where the main economic sector for the people would’ve been kidnapping, enslaving, and selling each other to the West. And, of course, the West happily consumed them.
Which is not that different than the soccer industry.
I sort of feel like there are obviously big differences, which is kind of hard to get one's head round in relation to the contemporary African soccer business, and that is that there's very little opportunity cost involved in going to play soccer. So, on the one hand, it's true that unscrupulous soccer speculators are producing these essentially puppy mill type situations where they bring in lots of soccer players, many of whom have no real prospect of becoming soccer professionals, and they do it on the basis and hope to turn out one or two players and make money off of them. It's true, also that all the risk — not all the risk — but a lot of the risk, most of the risk is born by the young players.
The weird thing is that if I kidnap you, Kevin, as a young boy, it's tragic and then lock you up for 20 years and then sort of completely waste your youth, which is what happens to a lot of black American youth, they're just randomly sort of arrested by the state and tossed into prison for 30 years, that's the tragedy to a large part, because you've missed out on the life that you would've had had you not been kidnapped. It's opportunity culture. It's the cost of the path not taken. In Africa it's slightly different. Some of these soccer players, they come from such desperate circumstances, it's not as if they would've otherwise become sort of nuclear engineers. It's that terrible thing of a traditional life in Africa coming under enormous stress from the global economy, from climate change, and these people victimized and they're almost, their lives don't have the sort of value even to themselves in some ways that you might attribute if they were born elsewhere. It's the dehumanization of poverty and it has an effect on their own self sense of value. If you say to them, “Well, don't go to Istanbul. It's too risky. That's a bad idea.” The answer would obviously be, “Well, what else am I going to do?” So the predicament is a terrible one and it is terrible because of the structural poverty that exists.
So as I'm reading this, and as you're talking, I'm thinking comparing the two experiences, I often wonder what writers think about when they write a book. When I write for news people and magazines and stuff, I don't think of overarching themes. I try to just tell the best story I can, and then the themes come up later. As hearing you talk, I'm wondering if you thought about those things that you're talking about before you or if it's something that you were conscious of after?
I've become more conscious. This is only the second time I'm talking about this book — this interview — so I'm still waffling on about. I still don't, and as you know, interviews are not necessarily about me discovering or disclosing this kind of long-held truths that I possess. They're more about me putting myself in the interview and coming up with something that sounds vaguely plausible. So I don't even know if I believe half the stuff I'm talking about.
I sort of find interviews interesting because they give me an opportunity to reflect on what I've written because once you're in it —you're in the story writing an article or a novel — the story has its own secret life and identity, and you have to feed it. It's a little animal that has to be fed what it wants, and you can't necessarily feed it what you want to feed it because it might reject it, it'll throw it up.
You're just trying to get in and get out. It takes you 10 years to do it. Having said that, obviously — I don't want to parody, I don't want to be disparage any other sorts kind of story out there — there are lots of stories which I'm not writing and possibly you're not writing. I have these kind of lifelong thematic interests and inclinations and obsessions, and of course they sort of saturate the story as I write it.
One of the interests here is I was thinking about it is this is an old school workplace drama too. So, have ever worked in an office like a co-op?
I was a lawyer for years, and the kind of lawyer I was in London was a Barrister and they are self-employed, but they work in a co-op actually called the Chambers. Now, it's very, very difficult to get offered a spot in the chambers. That's the really hard part. It's very competitive, hundreds of people for one spot, but when it does work, it works really well. You go into the office every day and you don't have any bosses there. You have colleagues. It's a great feeling and everyone's doing their own thing. We have administrative staff and we discuss how that's going and whether we need to hire someone new or whatever. And that's it, really.
This was years ago. I haven't done that for 20 years.
This goes to your question: I had no particular idea why this kind of subplot, which arrived two thirds of the way into the writing of the book, and narrator suddenly materialize. I was curious. I was like, “What's this got to do with my story of two brothers kind of looking for a soccer talent, trying to find a soccer talent?” I had no idea. But I kept going because I sort of felt, well, here it is, it's here for some reason. And I was also tired of the slightly story with one narrator and we're inside his head for the whole book and it's his story. I was exhausted with that. I felt very energized by the appearance of this kind woman who's telling this kind slightly mysterious story.
Then you finally realize at the end, as I did, why she was there all the time. As you can imagine, it's hair raising doing the two stories, not knowing why they're there and waiting for the resolution and the logic to reveal itself. But it did in the end and in a way I sort of found surprising. I sort of felt, if it's surprising to me, it'll be surprising to the reader as well. Later on, I began to understand what had happened. I was trying to merge a story of contemporary Africa with the story of contemporary America and I was trying to offer a drama that was on both sides of the Atlantic that was capable in being interpreted by references to the history of the Atlantic trade and so on and so forth.
I'm teaching The Odyssey to my freshmen classes and there's a lot of that similar style of storytelling. Each book can have multiple narrators talking to you and giving you information. I mean, there's one NARRATOR, but people are giving speeches as narrators and it's a really fascinating technique. I'm trying to explain to these kids that these stories will connect and repeat and we use these same ideas and techniques today. And the two narrators in Godwin do something similar where they give us a perspective of the journey from separate places, which allows us as a reader to then see more of Wolfe as opposed to only living in his world.
It's like in The Odyssey, people stay behind
Constantly.
There's always people, and women in particular, stay behind. But, obviously The Heart of Darkness Stuff I was quite aware of all that, which is to say that Africa, just the word Africa, is the beginning of a long history narrativity around Africa with everything being in inverted and inverted that are only of recent vintage. Incidentally, our whole sense of Africa and of what happens there is this is all the product of the rather fruitful, theoretical, post-colonial thinking and writing that has happened in the last hundred years. Of course, I always feel like if you come from Ireland, which I do on one side of my family, you have a kind of natural sense of the colonial and the drum of colonialism. When I think now, and I'm now beginning to think that maybe it's not a coincidence that Roger Casement was Irish nationalist who was involved gave his life for the cause of Irish independence in the early 20th century, but who made his name as an administrator who revealed the horrors of colonial Congo.
So there's a tradition there, which is kind of partly located in Ireland of beginning to kind of narrate a story and tell it in a way that somewhat disturbs more conventional stories. Now, Conrad himself, of course, has come under a lot of scrutiny
Who hasn't, at this point. We're all under scrutiny.
But I mean, in particular, there's a mini industry around revisiting Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and so on. But of course, I have a much more sympathetic, artistic, sympathy with Conrad. I felt very much his spirit as a kind of interlocutor in all of this.
I think you could have your qualms about the things he says, but then you can't ignore the impact the story has had on other stories. You have to acknowledge how much influence he has had.
Yes, you do. I am a writer and I have to acknowledge that his sentences are amazing. I have to acknowledge that he went to the trouble of traveling around the world, which most writers can't be bothered to do. Most writers can't be bother to do any of that nonsense, particularly now. The idea that you sort of involve yourself in all sorts of enormously risky and uncertain personal travels isn't something that most writers can be bothered with anymore. Now, I know that he did it professionally, and it was a different world then.
I can't afford to travel as much as I wish I could.
But you probably could. You probably could. Honestly, you just have to hitchhike. I mean, there you go. Now you're traveling. That's what it is. So if you really wanted to do it, I think you probably could. And he [Conrad], I feel a special sympathy with Conrad because he was sort of a displaced individual in many ways. He wrote in English and spoke French beautifully and lived in England, and was forced into his life of seafaring for economic reasons or financial reasons. So, as you say, it's always possible to take issue with this stuff, and it's important that you do take issue with it, but on the other hand, if you're a writer, you have to have a certain insight of what the strengths of writers are. Otherwise, we're not going to read anybody
Now, why Pittsburgh?
Oh, I love Pittsburgh. I travelled there by accident once and I loved the city. I didn't want New York. I've done New York. I wanted Pittsburgh, and of course, Pittsburgh has this great history of manufacturing and capitalism. So, of course, the idea of putting a co-op there, which kind of offers an alternative idea to labor and the sort of questions that Marxism brings about seemed logical and fun.