Danny Rhodes (1)

This review was originally published to my blog at https://livemanylives.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/fan-by-danny-rhodes/

The opening chapter of Fan, the new novel from Grantham born author Danny Rhodes, made me feel like this might be a book for Nottingham Forest fans of a certain age. I followed my team to Wembley to see them lift the League Cup, I was at the City Ground when we bade farewell to Brian Clough, Highbury when Brian Rice became a legend and I was at Hillsborough when a beautiful Spring day turned into a nightmare and as a teenager I came face to face with death on an awful scale. Later I even sat behind Clough at Eton Park as we both supported his son Nigel in his first steps into management. The fictional John Finch walked many of the same roads that I trod myself in real life.

It isn’t just about a personal history of following Forest, however, there is a wider social history in these pages that will resonate with a much broader audience. All football fans in the 1980’s, before Italia ’90, the Premier League and prawn sandwich hospitality, were impacted by the emphasis on control rather than safety of football crowds and the chapter on the Bradford fire will cause all fans to bristle with anger. And whilst football is a major backdrop these events also coincided with the Thatcher government, the Miners’ Strike and huge social change in Britain.

There is also a fierce human energy that drives the book forwards through a series of short, snappy chapters that keep the pages turning and emphasise the desperate emotion of a man overflowing with demons. The football is a backdrop but John Finch is really facing two points of crisis and transition, ones that we all recognise. In 1989 the safe and familiar environment of his youth is falling away and he is wondering what lies ahead of him, old friendships coming to an end and Hillsborough bringing the reality of death crashing into the experience of previously indestructible youth. Whilst in 2004 he is faced with another major change, a partner who wants to settle down and start a family, but he cannot provide a solid future for a potential wife and kids when his past is still unresolved.

Finch heads back to his home town of Grantham to face his demons, but it’s messy. He has to see the world through other people’s eyes as well as his own, has to learn to accept who he was and who he is now and has to acknowledge that life isn’t straightforward, answers are not perfect, the world does not revolve around him and everyone is just trying to make the best of it in whatever way they can. The narrative glides between these two periods of time as Finch tries to bring proper closure to his first departure so that he can leave again more able to move on into the responsibility of adulthood. It is an emotional human story that will appeal to anyone who has mourned lost youth and feared the responsibility of family life.

As a football fan it is the story of a game that has also had to face great change and has done so imperfectly. The warnings upon warnings that built up to death on a horrific scale at Hillsborough are devastating. Why did it take so long for anything to change? Why did the football authorities, the clubs, the government and the media seek to criminalise and dehumanise football fans, determined to control rather than protect? Why did the fans themselves not refuse the cages of death they were forced into each week and also refuse the violence within their own ranks?

In the end it took the loss of 96 innocent lives in Sheffield to make change happen and much of it has been good – the ability to watch football safely should never be under-valued, the past never forgotten – but in amongst it something significant has been lost. The changes have been used to increase prices, to sanitise atmosphere, to commercialise football and to replace the passion of labour with the wealth of capital. Football has been cleansed and as a result sterilised.

In his closing acknowledgements Rhodes calls for the game to be given back to the fans. It is an appealing statement but also a broad one that has all sorts of interpretations and implications. It is difficult to pin down, it’s messy, just like John Finch’s journey through his past and his tentative steps forward into an uncertain future. It is good that the game has moved away from its violent past, but it also needs to take some time to reflect on what it has become and where its future lies. Football is about the fans, but fans are a diverse group with different needs and all need to be considered.

The best writing stays with you, makes you think well beyond closing the back cover. Fan does that on two levels; life and football. What else is there?… (mere)

Fan – So Close to home.

As I sit here thinking about how I can do justice to this semi-autobiographic novel Fan by Danny Rhodes a lot of old memories have come flooding back some pleasant some not so pleasant. This novel is really in two halves, pre-Hillsborough and post-Hillsborough and Rhodes uses the persona of John Finch teenage fan who lived for following Nottingham Forest home and away but who was at Hillsborough on that fateful day in April 1989 when 96 people died and was a witness to what unfolded that day.

As I sit here 25 years later writing this review just up the M56, twenty minutes or so drive from my house in Manchester those 96 football fans coroner’s inquest is happening. This very week there was mention of a similar scene that happened in 1981 between Spurs and Wolves and the injuries that day at the inquest I read a passage about that in Fan too.

Fan resonated with me in many ways in that I was a teen in the 80s in what is often referred to as the dark days of football and Thatcher. Like Finch I travelled and stood in grounds home and away on terraces that were not fit for purpose and that was just at my teams ground at Maine Road. The stories we could all tell about away days in Yorkshire with the half-wits that made up South Yorkshire Police. Rhodes through his character Finch literally is describing what is now a lost world one that a new comer to football would not recognise, where the fan was treated like muck and despised by the political leadership under Margaret Thatcher.

That hatred of football came after the events of 15th April 1989 during the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest when fans filled two central fenced in pens and were slowly crushed to death as officials watched on and did nothing. As fans tried to save lives of their own as South Yorkshire Police tried in vain to stop them. Forest fans at the other end of the ground bore witness to those slow merciless deaths as did Liverpool fans.

The main arch of the story is that as usual home and away John Finch had followed the tricky trees to this zenith of possible end of season triumph. Up until then his life had been school then work as a postman living for 3pm on Saturdays. The old life of a teenage lad in the 80s was the booze and the birds no political correctness here and the football. When football could attract the teenagers because it was cheap afternoon out some grounds pay at the turnstile and away the lads. A pulsating mass of testosterone and booze, many working class lads escaping the drudgery of life around them. Or it certainly was for many of us football was our release the political elites did not understand us in our casual gear getting in scrapes and drinking more beer than a standard liver can take.

The book rolls forward 15 years and John Finch is now a teacher and a southern softie to boot, he no longer travels around the country watching Forest as something has been lost to him, there is something he needs to deal with but like most men he is fearful to talk about events of fifteen years previously. He is travelling in to work when he hears of Clough’s death and his mind starts to travel back to 15th April 1989. It has become the elephant in the room he like others knows it’s there but do not want to broach the subject. Doom and despondency starts to embrace him which is made worse while on dinner time supervision duties when there is a crush at one of the doors and he freezes and swears at the children and is sent home by the head teacher and put on the sick. It gets worse for him when he is informed one of the lads he went to Forest with has committed suicide.

Finch’s nervous breakdown is complete as he heads home for the first time in years for the funeral, a funeral he cannot face as he wanders around his old town. He desperately wants to talk to the lads and see how they are dealing with the after effects and memories of Hillsborough but they just do not want to talk. He relives 1989 and the aftermath and how it changed him as he meets old friends and enemies. This is the one journey in his life John Finch had to make as he is finally able to close a chapter on his life that has always been there but never dealt with.

This is a heartfelt plea that is deeply personal to Danny Rhodes in which the read feels all the gut wrenching emotions and how events not only change lives but can be permanent changed, for better or worse. Fan is about the collective tragedy that fans on that day felt and how not dealing with things such as grief can deeply affect your life.

This year is 25 years since Danny Rhodes attended that Semi-Final at Hillsborough it has taken that long for the football fans of Liverpool FC to be listened to and ending the cover-up that took place blaming the fans for the tragedy. 96 football fans that day were never able to go home after the game and their mates, their families were blamed for Hillsborough. In Liverpool and Nottingham where families could bury their dead but then fight for justice have never had the time to grieve and deal with those issues. This book is a reminder that once Justice for the 96 has been achieved maybe just maybe the after affects of that day can start to be dealt with. There were 96 football fans killed that day and thousands of witnesses who need help dealing with what they saw. Liverpool never forgot the 96 now it is time to remember the witnesses and help them too.… (mere)

Having read and admired Rhodes' first novel, 'Asboville', a few years ago, I've had 'Soldier Boy' on my to-read list for some time now. I finally got around to it a few days ago and I'm very glad I did. It's got some of the best features of 'Asboville' (authenticity, empathy, humanity) but as the story progresses Rhodes takes things to another level, the narrative shifting from gritty realism to something altogether more lyrical and mysterious. There's a subtle intelligence at work in this fine book, and plenty of evidence that Rhodes is a writer who will continue to go from strength to strength. I look forward to his next.… (mere)

'Asboville' is the story of JB, a disaffected teenager from London who finds himself - under threat of harsher penalties - living in a caravan with his gruff uncle in a less than glamorous seaside town. Under the terms of his ASBO, he is obliged to paint beach huts all day, and be back in the caravan by seven o'clock every night. He doesn't take to it easily, but he does take to it, despite the dangerous distraction of the local teen gang and the less dangerous, but just as unsettling, appearance of Sal, a local girl with problems of her own.

'Asboville', for me, was a bit of a slow burner and, whilst it's readable from the outset, it took me a little while to get into it. I also found myself distracted during some of the early pages by the occasionally less than convincing attention to detail. However, it wasn't too long before I was drawn into the increasingly engaging plot - laced with a little mystery here and there - and 'Asboville' then claimed that highest of honours: it became a book that the reader really doesn't want to put down. The beach hut painting idea, which at first glance seems a fairly mundane one, is very skilfully manipulated and, together with his use of Sal, Rhodes offers subtle confirmation of Freud's assertion that love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

All of this makes 'Asboville' sound very much like a book for adults, and indeed it is. But Rhodes knows his subject, and his insights into the minds of teenagers in a fractured society have both authenticity and the potential (in the way that only a good novel can have) for instruction and enlightenment. My son is fifteen years old. If I could get him to read anything at all, I'd get him to read this.… (mere)