Book review

Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool FC in the club’s halcyon days of the1960s and 1970s, once said: ‘Football isn’t just a matter of life and death, it’s far more important than that.’ But as David Goldblatt shows in this penetrating study, it was a sport then in apparently terminal decline.The deaths in the next decade of so many fans at Bradford from fire, and at Hillsborough from suffocation, exposed both its obsolete infrastructure and and anachronistic governance. It had few friends in high places and no ready access to funds. In 1963 the maximum wage of £100 per week had been abolished.

In the early days of Victorian railways, train journeys were (rightly) considered so dangerous that ticket offices sold life insurance as well as tickets. There were no onboard toilets until the 1890s, meaning that passengers either had to cross their legs or buy a ‘secret travelling lavatory’, consisting of a rubber tube and bag hidden inside the clothes. Some traditions, though, were already well-established. ‘The real disgrace of England,’ wrote Anthony Trollope in 1869, ‘is the railway sandwich.’ These three facts all come from the first chapter of Iain Gately’s exploration of commuting. They also serve as a neat summary both of what’s best and what’s most odd about Rush Hour as a whole.

George Bernard Shaw called him a ‘Yankee Shakespeare peopling his isle with Calibans’. He was dubbed ‘a fighting Tolstoy’ and ‘the great American blues man of the theatre’. Before he was 35, Eugene O’Neill had emerged as the first real titan of American theatre, a preeminence he has never lost. When Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930, he responded that they should have given it to O’Neill, because he had done ‘nothing much in American drama save to transform it utterly… from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendour and fear and greatness’. O’Neill’s struggle to wrench American theatre into splendour, fear and greatness is the subject of Robert M.

They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God. A raft of readers hate sci-fi, and probably more sheer away at the very idea of a novel about a missionary. And yet… And yet The Book of Strange New Things works. It is in many ways extraordinary; its narrative drive, its lack of sentimentality, its occasional (emotional) brutality, its humour (albeit rare) all add up to a novel which is both intelligent, thought-provoking and as readable as a potboiler. Peter, ex-junkie, loving husband, cat-lover, sets off on a journey. The novel opens with his farewell to his wife, and we gather that he will be gone a while and that he might be in danger.

Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I write this, I should experiment with a glass of beer. In any case, one day back in the 1970s — when rock stars were particularly prone to experimentation — Bob Dylan dropped in on Neil Young, who played him a song detailing his extensive drug-related experiments (with grass, cocaine and amphetamines). At the end of the performance, Dylan remarked drily, ‘That’s honest.’ Young still laughs when he remembers this. Partly it was because Dylan, who had done some experimenting himself back in the day, knew where Young was coming from. Also, though, what makes it funny is that all artists are in the business of revelation.

Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I know favour ‘bog books’. And having written one or two books myself that teeter on the edge of frivolity, I know that for your book to be kept in what Americans call the ‘bathroom’ is essentially a compliment. As long as it’s there to be read, of course. Oddly enough, the two best loo books of the year I have already and separately reviewed in these pages. The Most of Nora Ephron (Doubleday, £20, Spectator Bookshop, £16.