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Literary Review
New directions
SURESH MENON
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Netherland shows one possible way forward for the novel: from the post-colonial cul de sac to a post-national open-endedness.
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Netherland, Joseph O’Neill, price not stated
In 1754, Benjamin Franklin returned from England carrying with him a copy of the 1744 Laws of the Game, and soon cricket was firmly established in America. It was among the first outdoor sports played there. The U.S. vs. Canada match in 1844 was the first international encounter as we understand the term today. America’s greatest player, the fast bowler John Barton King, developed the outswinger, and on a tour of the Gentlemen of Philadelphia at the turn of the 20th century, he headed the bowling averages in England.
By the time King retired, cricket was in decline; baseball had taken over as America’s most popular sport. In the 21st century, cricket survives among Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians and Sri Lankans but just below the consciousness level of the Americans. “You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country?” a character asks in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. “Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.” By ignoring the melting pot in their backyard, America has both suffered and caused much suffering.
Cricket and national histories
“If the French nobles had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants,” wrote the historian G.M.Trevelyan, “their châteaux never would have been burnt.” Perhaps if George W. Bush played cricket…
When an Irishman born in Holland, educated in the U.K. and settled in the U.S. (one of whose grandfathers is Turkish, just to make the mixture more fascinating) turns to cricket as a metaphor for post-9/11 America, you recall Johnson’s story of the dog walking on its hind legs: the wonder is not that it is done well, but that it is done at all. Netherland has been compared to both The Great Gatsby and A House for Mr Biswas.
The protagonist, Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman, drifts through the novel while things happen to people and places around him. He befriends Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon whose mission is to civilise America through cricket. “Americans cannot really see the world,” he says, “They think they can, but they can’t. Look at the problems we are having. It’s a mess, and it’s going to get worse. I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims . . . With the New York Cricket Club we could start a whole new chapter in US history.”
“All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilised when they’re playing cricket,” he explains. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle.”
Chuck is just as keenly aware of the money in the game. In his office there is a poster of Sachin Tendulkar, and he wants to organise an India-Pakistan match in Brooklyn. “I am talking about advertising . . . Global TV rights. Coca-Cola, Nike, they’re all desperate to get at the south Asian market,” he tells Hans.
Netherland is not a smooth read — it jumps back and forth in time, and while addressing the big themes it glosses over the smaller, personal ones. But to write an epic in 256 pages takes rare skill, and to pack it with such despair and hope while signposting the way forward for the novel as a form — taking it from the post-colonial cul de sac to post-national open-endedness is a stunning achievement.
Exquisite prose
In some of the descriptions of cricket, the prose matches anything Cardus wrote (to digress, isn’t it strange that Americans have written some of the best cricket in recent years — Mike Marqusee, and now Joseph O’Neill?)
Netherland is a layered book about acceptance too. Hans, the only White man in his club grew up on the principle of keeping “the ball down”. Lofting it is a compromise, a sacrifice of the fundamental duty of the creation of beauty at the altar of success. “You’ve got to hit the thing in the air,” Chuck tells him, “How else are you going to get runs.? This is America. Hit the ball in the air, man.”
Sport as metaphor
“It’s not how I bat,” Hans protests. Yet he finally bats like that. And then “everything is suddenly clear” and at last he feels “naturalised”. Cricket is only a small part of Netherland, yet its most fascinating part.
In his delightful book, Playing Hard Ball, the cricketer Ed Smith wrote, “there is a limit to how much a game can be made to represent or embody, and in the case of cricket that point was reached long ago.” True enough, when you realise that the world leader who said, “Cricket? It civilises people and makes gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket,” is Robert Mugabe.
Yet the beauty of Joseph O’Neill’s novel lies in the use of a sport as a metaphor in a country that has nothing to do with it. It is like a mathematician using an old formula to throw light on a new problem. The American Dream as dreamt by immigrants is what made the country great; those who forget their history forget how it can be repeated.
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