Synopsis
Not Matter of Life and Death is about the grim reality behind the lifestyles that are sold to us. Our culture suggests that lifestyle choices can define and complete us, but the book exposes that myth with a unique dark humour. It is bitter but entertaining and ultimately rewarding.
It achieves this by subverting the genre of the; lad-culture; football-based novel.
Each chapter is a match in the football season. The reader may well begin reading under the impression that the book is non-fictional, until events start to become a bit weird; not quite supernatural, but certainly out of the ordinary.
The narrator supports Wolves, and goes to almost all the games. He is obsessed with finding meaning in his life following the death of his father, the disappearance of his older brother and the breakdown of his only significant relationship. He tries to do this through various unhealthy obsessions, including football, sex, alcohol and drugs, all of which prove (initially) useless.
He starts to discover weird tapes of music in his car that it becomes obvious are being sent by his (presumed dead) brother. He begins a relationship with a struggling artist who becomes interested in his obsession as an artistic subject, and his Mum marries the local vicar, who is clearly gay.
Meanwhile Wolves offer the odd high point (like beating Manchester United [yes, that actually happened]) but are more often than not a source of wearisome disappointment.
However, his obsession with football (which is initially a bleak indication of futility), becomes the means by which he comes to terms with his sense of loss and isolation. He eventually lifts himself out of his depression by relying on what matters to him, not what culture tells him should be important. The book ends on a note which, whilst far from comfortable, is nevertheless one of hope.
Samples - Prologue
[The play-off final that takes Wolves into the Premiership]
One second everything is fine, the next a splitting headache bursts out of the back of my neck and spreads over my skull to the back of my eyeballs. This happens at the exact second that the penalty-kick leaves their player’s boot, and history hesitates at a crossroads;
Not real history, of course, which is a vast and overwhelming thing, and not even the more manageable but still unwieldy history of the game of football, with its many valuable associated histories of class, culture, race and violence. This is a crossroads only in the history of a single football club, a thin and rarefied strand of history, one strand out of countless millions, of interest to some, but of real importance only to its supporters. And my personal strand of history is thinner and of less consequence even than that.
The sudden sharp pain of the headache takes me completely by surprise. Sadly, the same cannot be said about the awarding of the penalty, which was also a sudden sharp pain, but had occurred with an air of familiar but sickening inevitability.
Despite having no doubts that we will lose the match - the most important in my lifetime supporting Wolves - I am unable to find solace in either resignation or perspective. The fact that my obsession is of no consequence only makes it worse. I must deal not only with the agonies of the obsession itself, but also with the guilt that I am helping no-one, that such entrenched solipsism is nothing less that a social evil, a cultural negative, a political wrong.
But I’m not concerned with this as Matt Murray dives the right way, saves the penalty, and watches the follow-up sail over the bar.
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I wonder, as I often do, whether Paul ever catches the football results; because like the rest of us I can’t bring myself to believe he’s dead. We all, including Paul, saw Dad’s body, surreal and transformed but undeniably him, and in that moment we were able to recognise, if not instantly accept, the reality and the finality of his death. But with Paul there was no moment of epiphany, only a creeping absence, gradually growing with each unanswered phone call as all trails went cold and the police admitted failure and stopped looking. Perhaps if we had not so recently seen the reality of death with our own eyes we would have been more willing to assume, as the police did, that its clammy presence explained Paul’s disappearance.
I don’t know why I imagine that Paul has developed a sudden interest in the football results, though. I suppose he might see them as some kind of connection to home, a direct line into the emotions of his distant family, but its more likely that he’s up a mountain somewhere reading Finnegan’s Wake for the third time, or in India learning to play Tabla, while I’m stuck in a motionless snarling queue of traffic on the M61, the skies darkening rapidly and a sticker on the rear window of the car in front, depicting a grinning Manchester United fan urinating onto an Arsenal shirt, annoying the hell out of me
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[The narrator drives to a match in Portsmouth]
I lived by the sea for three years and I never saw it as angry as this. The waves are lone-wolf grey, steely and burning with an intense lust for death as they hammer at the shore, screaming insanely in hideous counterpoint to the depraved monkey-like howling of the wind. Violent gusts rock the car as I force my way down the sea-front, children’s play areas and crazy-golf courses looking hopelessly embittered in this grotesque parody of the seaside, a post-holocaust hell made all the more foul by the tattered leftovers of a fun-obsessed civilisation. Rain screeches over these concrete expanses and lashes the windscreen with fierce violence - a rabid, insane Mother Nature protecting children long since dead.
These children have their memory fastened to lamp-posts with hastily tied pieces of fraying string, withered bunches of flowers marking the scenes of fatal accidents and drunken attacks with broken bottles, small cards with child-like scrawls dribbling in the rain in remembrance of a pointless snuffed-out life. I seem to be seeing more and more of these impromptu shrines, erected by some blind instinct crow-barred from racial memory, but it might be that I am becoming more tuned in to the symbols of death that litter this country. The further I travel in my comfortable silver bubble, the more I feel that England is laying out messages for me along its roadsides, reminders of mortality like mile after mile of crucified slaves along the Appian Way.
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It’s one of those days in which the world seems to have been scattered with a buzzing excitement. Every surface pings with brilliance, and light seems to bounce off the hidden sixth and seventh dimensions that are curled in on themselves behind the visible fabric of reality. I feel drunk but totally in control, dazzled by the glitter that hangs around Molineux like a blessing.
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[The narrator describes scattering his Dad’s ashes on a mountain in Wales]
Without warning the clouds above us were torn to shreds by a sudden burst of light that flooded into the valley below, ripping the shroud away from the stifled land and for a few brief moments revealing the vast canopy of the heavens and the true majesty of the earth. The soaring hulks of the mountain peaks burst into view with breathtaking drama, floating in colossal defiance of nature on the banks of clouds that massed beneath them and glowed with an inner light borrowed from the rays of the sun. Distant summits shone out in stark relief in the sudden sunlight, their jagged edges the true manifestation and source of all those times when every cell of my body screams out in desperation at the inadequacy of all my physical and mental responses to being alive.
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[From the final chapter]
Molineux is glowing brilliantly in the sunshine as thousands of gold and black balloons cascade upwards into the clear blue sky, a flock of tiny dreams disappearing into the heat of the sun. Silence fills the air, ghostly and unearthly as nearly thirty thousand people stand without daring to breathe as they remember a legendary Wolves player, and Nick and I remember the dead members of our family.
