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One night in Belgium
by
Andrew Hussey
 For
many years now, the French have produced some of the
best football writing in the world. L'Equipe and
magazines such as France Football and So Foot are not
only distinguished by their incisive approach to the
game but, like the French national team at its best,
combine intelligence with flair and flamboyance. There
is, too, a thriving underground culture of blogs and
fanzines, testimony not only to the French love of
football but also to the crucial role it plays in the
national psyche.
But there has never been any tradition in France of
serious book-length writing on what is effectively, just
as it is in England, the national game. Equivalents of
Nick Hornby and David Peace do not exist in France and
there is a prejudice against football fans in the
middle-class French imagination.
This makes it all the more startling that two of the
most successful and provocative books recently published
in Paris have football-related themes. The first of
these is La Mélancolie de Zidane, a treatise on the
great France World Cup captain by the Belgian writer and
film-maker Jean-Philippe Toussaint (see panel). More
intriguing still is Dans La Foule, a gripping 400-page
fictional account of the Heysel tragedy of 1985, when 39
fans were killed at the European Cup final between
Liverpool and Juventus. The Tours-born author describes
this match as his 'September 11th moment'.
The story centres on four separate groups of supporters
drawn together in the terrible massacre on the terraces
in Brussels. These are the French fans Jeff and Tonino;
the Liverpool fan Geoff and his brothers; a young
Italian married couple called Tania and Francesco; and
the Belgians Gabriel and Virginie. They first come
together on the eve of the match, drinking beer and
swapping banter. On the day of the final they become
lost in the crowd, in the confusion, the cries of hate
and pain. They come together again in the hospital,
where they are treated for shock and injuries. This is
when Tania realises that Francesco is missing, probably
dead. There is a slyly disingenuous but utterly
convincing confession from Geoff, which reminds the
reader of nothing so much as Meursault's final speech in
Albert Camus's L'Etranger.
 Mauvignier's
technique is impressive. The novel has a polyphonic
structure that allows each character to take the lead in
the appropriate chapter. This can be disorientating -
just like being in a real crowd - but it is an effective
and ultimately shattering device that takes the novel
beyond mere reportage and into the more troubling and
sinister terrain of the minds of those who led the
fighting at Heysel. As a Liverpool fan myself, and one
who like many others watched events unfold that terrible
night with a mixture of dread and exhilaration, I was
alert to the novelist's tendency to simplify and
demonise football fans. Geoff emerges, however, as an
intelligent and fully nuanced character whose real crime
is to belong to a tribe, a crowd, and to love the loss
of self-consciousness that this entails. All football
fans know that this is a fundamental part of who they
are and why they watch the game.
French intellectuals have not always scorned football:
the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote brilliantly
on Heysel in his essay 'The Transparency of Evil'. Now,
football is forcing a new generation of writers to ask
hard questions about their culture, as vicious warfare
between Arab and working-class white supporters looks
likely to tear apart the once-great Paris Saint-Germain,
while Olympique de Marseille, fuelled by local
patriotism, continue their own strange campaign against
the rest of France. In the early 1970s, the Situationist
thinker Guy Debord described English football hooligans
as representing the vanguard of revolt against what he
termed 'the society of spectacle'. This book is firmly
in the same tradition of sociological analysis but, at
the same time - and this is its strength - it
demonstrates both the compelling power of football
culture as well as its tragic capacity for self-destruction.
Fonte:
Theguardian.com
© 4 February 2007
Fotografie: GETTY
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