On… Season
38 games, and one great book?
“They wanted gladiators, was what it was.”
George Harrison - Season
What does football mean to you?
Is it a routine? Or is it a release?
Season by George Harrison follows two lonely men, one young and one old, as they begin a tentative friendship over a footballing campaign at a fictional club that everyone knows is Norwich City.
It’s a beautiful book but one that didn’t grab me at first. I wanted to read it as I’m agentless, despite my obvious talent, and I’m desperate for evidence that someone who writes like me, and for people like me, can make it with a book about football and fandom. And Season has taken off, with great reviews, and presumably, massive respect and sales.
It’s a slow burn. I started it hoping for blood and thunder, but found introspection instead; football as an explanation rather than an experience. The two characters felt far removed from the Millwall I’ve tried to invoke; deep thinkers more likely to unwrap some home-made sandwiches than a powder made in Bolivia. The kind of unthreatening, bland, sadsack supporters you might find at The Valley, or The Emirates, or maybe Selhurst Park — although both the main characters are capable of functional relationships with adult women, so maybe not the latter.
This was football as an ‘anchoring presence’ rather than an ‘inciting incident’; highbrow, not high-octane. And it was told by an omniscient narrator writing for those unfamiliar with the game, enlightening us on tights and headbands and parachute payments and supporter segregation, which of course the regular fan already knows more than enough about…
But as I read on, I realised I’d misjudged Season and could see what Harrison was trying – and succeeding – to do. As the pages turn the two men add depth, and humanity, and I began to relate to them. We see love, companionship, worry, growth. We see society as well as the Saturday experience; the Old Man struggling to stay on top of an ailing wife and to remain relevant as a new city he does not recognise is built around him, the Young Man battling solitude and physical frailty and a deep desire to be loved; seeking an explanation for the uneven behaviour of a vulnerable woman he cares deeply for, but will never, ever understand.
Harrison gives us transformation too, echoed by the title Season, as the cold winter and fear of what lies ahead bite into the bones of the Old Man, and the Young Man suffers his own growing pains, tussling with a dead-end job and dysfunctional family, and yet still striving and beginning to mature. We see the things that change, but also the things that stay the same. And Harrison gives us men; the way we bond, our common concerns, the ‘common distances’ we all live with.
At its best point, we’re close to Alan Sillitoe, which of course is the standard to which we must all aspire. Take this section:
“A stadium ban could end the affair for years or for life, the football authorities and the police and the clubs lining up against troublesome fans, denying them their passion. Disregarding complex social problems – questions of masculinity and violence and the nihilism and emptiness of modern life – by simply neutering those who could not coexist peacefully with the game.”
… and it’s clear we’re in the hands of a top writer, who understands, and has things to say.
And that paragraph is no fluke. Observations of clarity and truth abound: West Ham fans who are a ‘goading, graceless mass’, ‘embarrassingly choreographed’ celebrations, ‘highly-edited’ player videos, tame shots, knee slides, away fans who ‘bring numbers’, the ‘partisan ball boy’, and the angry ‘Fuck’s sake’ uttered at the second conceded goal. Two men who, like us, share a distrust of the national team in its current guise, and who abhor – as we all do – the tyranny of the international break. Two men taken for granted, far-removed from the lives of the players they idolise, but loyal to the point of the tattooist’s needle nonetheless.
“The army of supporters in their uniform, in one voice, having paid their tithes even though they were among those who could least afford it, performing rituals calcified over a lifetime and finding this one means of being with people rather than merely around them, some willing to bleed for the crest (no coincidence, of course, that it lies over the heart)… If it were just a game then things would not be this way. If it were just a game, nobody would go.”
I mean — just read that again. What a writer Harrison is. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up just re-typing his words.
Season takes you to places you don’t expect. Like many top teams, it takes a few games to get going. It’s a wistful novel full of wisdom. It offers no easy answers to why football means so much, or explanations of male bonding, and yet it shows great insight into why we become obsessed with an identity, a formation, a foreign right back, or even a stadium… and how that shared love can lead to an understanding, even with those we may feel we have little in common with.
I’ll end by saying this. I’m so tempted to quote the beautiful language of the final paragraph on this blog, but I’m going to save it, because I want you to seek out Season, buy it, and read it, and think about it and share it. Consider it a gateway drug into Alan Sillitoe, John King, Stan Barstow, or even a young pretender to the throne. A trip through a turnstile that’ll take you onto the terraces, into literature, and into questioning what it truly means to be a man.
A great book, and one you will not regret buying.
The link is here. Enjoy.
++ What’s the best book about sport you’ve ever read? What’s the best book about friendship? And have you read my extract yet? Why not?
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Some other reviews…
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I’m George
A Millwall fan on a mission to bring you the finest in fiction and football every Friday.
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