Disastrously behind schedule (though that rather depends on your definition of what constitutes a disaster) I scoured the shelves of the local charity shops for a slim volume I could whip through in next to no time. Confronted by a sea of Tom Clancy and Maeve Binchy I wandered home, dispirited. I had, of course, forgotten the first rule of those who hoard book: there's always a tonne of stuff at home you haven't actually got round to reading yet.
And that was the case with this nasty but exhilarating little volume. An account of the bad old days of football hooliganism it features our protagonist, Paul Carty, a nice enough young man from a decent family whose less pleasant weekend hobby is going away with the Pack, Tranmere Rovers' organised firm of hooligans, and smashing the living bejaysus out of some poor provincial town centre.
The book opens with violence, and is punctuated by accounts of fights in various beknighted spots in the lower reaches of the Football League. These set pieces are all described with a degree of relish which can leave the reader with the vague sense of being a middle class tourist in someone else's milieu. Speaking as someone who had to run like hell from tooled-up Arsenal fans in the eighties, I don't have any rose-tinted hooligan memories, aggro's never really been my thing. But Sampson's razor's edge description do tap into something which I do remember, which is the young man's urge to destroy. In most cases it leads to self-destructive behaviour, here, Carty turns his angst outwards, as the fans of Shrewsbury and Chester can attest.
However, this wouldn't be much cop if it were just a book about an angry young man getting in a series of rucks. Awaydays is far cleverer than that. Carty is an interloper in The Pack's world, with his nice job and loving family. He hides his origins from his more authentically working class compadres. This is as much a book about the desire to fit in, about making yourself into something you're not. I remember as a very bookish boy one day making the momentous decision to go and sit at the hard kids' table as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I wished to be something other than what I was. They were surprised, warily accepting, and left me alone for the rest of the school year. But I could never join in their shoeing of other unfortunates. Carty, on the other hand, positively relishes it, losing himself in the violence. We are left to infer that this is something to do with the recent death of his mother, but it is also very much the desire to belong, to be part of the gang.
But it can't last. In between awaydays with The Pack, he works diligently at his job, and indulges in a frankly staggering amount of shagging. But his interests, his taste in music, in clothes, his erudition, all mark him out as something other. His final rejection is as inevitable as it is necessary.
It's a fascinating book in its evocation of time and place. By the time I'd moved to Ormskirk, Liverpool's regeneration was well under way, but there was enough eighties bleakness left that this book rings true to me. Post uni, when I continued the theme of not fitting in by working variously on building sites and as a bailiff in the nastier ends of the city, I met the cast of this book. I worked with guys who'd talk passionately of their love for Echo and the Bunnymen, before turning round and screaming racist slurs at someone walking past the scaffold. Men who lived for Saturday afternoons, fucking and fighting. I'd have a drink with them, I'd laugh at (some of) their jokes. They'd laugh at (some of) mine. I got called a cunt a lot. I threw a few insults back myself, but I was only ever a tourist, there was always academia to go back to (I recall fondly going straight off site to give a poetry reading, still in roofer's gear, jeans covered in dust). Carty's otherness in this book is very much that of the young man trying to lose himself, and failing, and as a depiction of that alone this is an excellent read.
And that was the case with this nasty but exhilarating little volume. An account of the bad old days of football hooliganism it features our protagonist, Paul Carty, a nice enough young man from a decent family whose less pleasant weekend hobby is going away with the Pack, Tranmere Rovers' organised firm of hooligans, and smashing the living bejaysus out of some poor provincial town centre.
The book opens with violence, and is punctuated by accounts of fights in various beknighted spots in the lower reaches of the Football League. These set pieces are all described with a degree of relish which can leave the reader with the vague sense of being a middle class tourist in someone else's milieu. Speaking as someone who had to run like hell from tooled-up Arsenal fans in the eighties, I don't have any rose-tinted hooligan memories, aggro's never really been my thing. But Sampson's razor's edge description do tap into something which I do remember, which is the young man's urge to destroy. In most cases it leads to self-destructive behaviour, here, Carty turns his angst outwards, as the fans of Shrewsbury and Chester can attest.
However, this wouldn't be much cop if it were just a book about an angry young man getting in a series of rucks. Awaydays is far cleverer than that. Carty is an interloper in The Pack's world, with his nice job and loving family. He hides his origins from his more authentically working class compadres. This is as much a book about the desire to fit in, about making yourself into something you're not. I remember as a very bookish boy one day making the momentous decision to go and sit at the hard kids' table as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I wished to be something other than what I was. They were surprised, warily accepting, and left me alone for the rest of the school year. But I could never join in their shoeing of other unfortunates. Carty, on the other hand, positively relishes it, losing himself in the violence. We are left to infer that this is something to do with the recent death of his mother, but it is also very much the desire to belong, to be part of the gang.
But it can't last. In between awaydays with The Pack, he works diligently at his job, and indulges in a frankly staggering amount of shagging. But his interests, his taste in music, in clothes, his erudition, all mark him out as something other. His final rejection is as inevitable as it is necessary.
It's a fascinating book in its evocation of time and place. By the time I'd moved to Ormskirk, Liverpool's regeneration was well under way, but there was enough eighties bleakness left that this book rings true to me. Post uni, when I continued the theme of not fitting in by working variously on building sites and as a bailiff in the nastier ends of the city, I met the cast of this book. I worked with guys who'd talk passionately of their love for Echo and the Bunnymen, before turning round and screaming racist slurs at someone walking past the scaffold. Men who lived for Saturday afternoons, fucking and fighting. I'd have a drink with them, I'd laugh at (some of) their jokes. They'd laugh at (some of) mine. I got called a cunt a lot. I threw a few insults back myself, but I was only ever a tourist, there was always academia to go back to (I recall fondly going straight off site to give a poetry reading, still in roofer's gear, jeans covered in dust). Carty's otherness in this book is very much that of the young man trying to lose himself, and failing, and as a depiction of that alone this is an excellent read.
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