Babylon Revisited (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been one of my absolute favourite writers, both for the economical beauty of his style and for the sense of slow burning tragedy that ghosts through the pages of his books, a kind of prophetic spirit warning that fast times cannot last forever; sooner or later, somebody has to pay the bill. However, I'm far more au fait with his novels ('This Side of Paradise', 'The Beautiful and Damned', 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Tender Is The Night') than the huge array of short fiction he produced between the early twenties and his premature death in 1940. It was therefore entirely serendipitous that I discovered this collection of three of his most bittersweet stories in the book cupboard at school and decided to take it for the for the train journey home a couple of weeks back.

The titular story concerns the aftermath of the Lost Generation's sojourn in Paris during America's boom years. During this time, Fitzgerald reminds us, tips of hundreds of francs were thrown to waiters and bell hops with gay abandon, and life was one long boozy lunch that never ended. The crash in 1929 has changed this as the protagonist of the story, Charles West, returns to Paris, sober and now living in Prague, where he has gone into business. His daughter, Honoria, has been under the care of his wife's sister and her husband since his wife died as a consequence of one drink filled night too many. Fitzgerald masterfully rouses the reader's sympathies as a contrite Charles spends a heroic amount of energy trying to convince Helen and Lincoln to grant him his daughter back. Nobody will believe he has changed, not them and ironically, not his old drinking buddies, Richard and Lorraine, who spend the entirety of the story trying to get him back into bad habits. The whole story is a masterpiece of subtle and controlled tension.

'The Cut Glass Bowl' concerns a marriage gone wrong, society beauty married to a careless and brusque older man. The tension inherent in the partnership is symbolised by a wedding gift, an enormous cut glass punch bowl which becomes a motif of pure ostentation and excess, and ultimately a vehicle for tragedy, as it claims something from each of her beloved children. This story is perhaps less subtle and more direct, but it captures the feeling of entrapment in domesticity and societal convention very nicely.

The final story, 'The Lost Decade', absolutely reeks of poignance, with a man being shown around an office he used to work at and wondering at the advancements in architecture since he first left the company. Fitzgerald elucidates the feeling of dislocation felt by the man concerned and also the confusion of the youngster showing him around, until it becomes clear that the new/old man lost an entire decade to alcoholism, a fact that is especially poignant given that Fitzgerald himself fought and lost a battle against the bottle himself.

These three stories give an incredible insight into The Jazz Age which is the backdrop to all of his literary works. What I found most interesting was the parallels between the post-crash years presented here and the current financial crisis our own world finds it in, all of the soul searching and reflection on the wastefulness of the boom years. These stories are the flip side of 'The Great Gatsby', tales of diminishing returns as opposed to ostentatious largesse; small tragedies as opposed to giant ones.

Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics (Jonathan Wilson)

You may notice, if you've been reading this blog for a while, that I have so far reviewed only fiction. However, I have catholic tastes when it comes to reading material, and so, having had a brief internal debate about whether I should include non-fiction reviews or not, I decided in the affirmative. I love football, therefore I read about football, and thus, I am writing about football.

Sports writing has been on the up and up for some time now, with a whole host of academic, scholarly, meticulously researched books hitting the shelves and catering for us sports afficianados who want, as the epigraph of this book has it, to "understand the causes of things". Anybody who thinks that sports journalism is all raving red top articles will be swiftly disabused if they read a text like Jonathan Wilson's 'Inverting The Pyramid'. 

Narrative poems, during the Renaissance, would precede the poem itself with "the argument" a short summary of the poetic matter about to be presented to the reader. Wilson's "argument" in this book is that the game of football is less about players than the systems they perform in. Throughout the history of the game, a well drilled side of average players has almost always beaten a side of stars with no direction. In pressing this line of argument, Wilson traces the entire history of player formations and the tactics encouraged by those systems, and from this comes the title of the book: in football's early years, teams played a 2-3-5 formation which formed, when viewed from above, a pyramid. In these early days, defending was viewed as negative and contrary to the spirit of the game, and so only two outfield players, the "full backs" were tasked with defensive duties. However, as time has gone on, more players have been added to this defensive unit, so that the pyramid has been "inverted" (when the British press bemoaned Terry Venables' "Christmas Tree" in the run up to Euro 96, this is what they were railing against, a continental system adopted in preference to 4-4-2).

Wilson's analysis of the trends and historical antecedents of parts of the game we now take for granted takes him across the footballing world. He starts in Victorian England and then moves on to Montivideo in the early Twentieth Century as he traces the genesis of the pyramid system. He then progresses to café culture Vienna, where the "Wunderteam" first experimented with players shifting positions to confuse the opposition. Meanwhile, in England, Arsenal's Herbert Chapman shifted a man back into defence, thus creating the "W-M'" formation (so named because of the shape the players made on the pitch) which soon became ubiquitous. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hungary became the best side in the world, humbling England 6-3 in 1953 as their players effortlessly shifted into areas England did not expect them to. Brazil was the home of the next tactical change, as 3-2-5 became 4-2-4, leading to their world cup triumphs in 1958 and 1962. Alf Ramsay, in 1966, created his "wingless wonders", an example of what Wilson terms "The English Pragmatism", while the World Cup of 1970 turned out to be the last time a team rolled their best players onto the pitch, told them to play, and triumphed. Total Football is the next subject on the agenda, a chapter Wilson shares between Ajax, Holland, Dynamo Moscow and the Soviet Union, as the principles of this vision of the game seemed to develop independently in two different locales. The comprehensive historical survey of the game's tactics ends with a discussion of the inevitable move back towards attacking players who can unlock massed defences.

One of the biggest strengths of 'Inverting The Pyramid' is its ability to move from continent to continent. Wilson has a particular affinity with Eastern Europe, and his discussion of Valeriy Lobanovski's Dynamo Kiev is particularly enjoyable and comprehensive, while he also goes to great lengths to explain the development of football in Argentina and Brazil. Another strength is his illumination of the great characters behind the tactics, from Jimmy Hogan, the great exporter of football expertise to Central Europe to Helenio Herrera, master of Catenaccio, the defensive system whose influence on Italian football persists to this day. Wilson's insights into all of these diverse characters give the book a real humanity, a warm beating heart beneath the cool, sophisticated skin of the prose.

For anybody who loves football, this is a must read. Not only is it brilliantly researched, well written and full of wonderful detail, it sweeps across a hundred odd years of football history while never losing sight of the argument made in the preface- that tactics are everything. Once you've read 'Inverting The Pyramid', you may well find yourself agreeing.