An awesome book about an awesome duo. - Rated 
Right from the beginning of this superb book it`s pretty obvious that Gordon Burn is not a football writer. He avoids the long, boring passages found in virtually all football writing which describe how so and so crossed the ball for what`s his name in the thirty-fifth minute of the match. Instead of that type of dross he goes for the jugular of his subjects. Duncan Edwards and George Best. Chalk and cheese yet peas in a pod. Both Manchester United legends, both gone before they should have gone. Edwards a product of the short back and sides era, Best the first real playboy football star. The common links with the two of them are Matt Busby and Bobby Charlton. Great football men in their own right. Both men survived the Munich horror which claimed Edwards and both men witnessed George Best`s career die an early death. The main thrust of the book is the contrast between the lifestyles of the two title characters and how society had changed drastically in the few years separating their appearances. I have read every book written about George, but I discovered some interesting, and not always flattering, facts here. As for Duncan, the more I read the more I regret never having seen him play. Awesome.
Absorbing Read - Rated
This is a rarity - an intellegent book about football. Every true football fan and - especially - every Manchester United fan should read it. As well as being about two of the greatest players the British game has produced it's about what has happened to the game - and indeed Britan itself - over the past fifty years. Although the book is about Edwards and Best the fulcrum around which it turns is actually Bobby Charlton. This book is written with intellegence and insight and is light years away from the normal fare served up to football followers. If you love and care about the British game then read this book. It's brilliant.
Dunc and Disorderly - Rated
While eyeing the shelves groaning this season with semi-literate footballers' 'autobiographies' with as much longevity as, well, as a premiership footballer, spare a thought for Best and Edwards, a real work of literature - of art, even - about football, by a real writer.
Gordon Burn has tackled "the psychopathology of fame" before - most notably in his novel Alma Cogan - and here he comes at it from two angles, featuring the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways." Duncan Edwards, the rising star of Manchester United and England, died in the Munich air crash in 1958 aged 21. Within the next 10 years Man U would have a new star, George Best, considered by Pele to be "the greatest footballer in the world." Best died too, but only after decades of alcohol abuse and one of the most ignominious descents ever witnessed in broad daylight by the eyes of the world and the media.
And the media is the third character in this extraordinary book. Because what Burn is interested in is not just the contrasting stories of Edwards and Best, but the whole shift in fame that occurred then, when fame went and 'celebrity' arrived. "Celebrity," in Burn's eyes, "is an indicator of how far fame has come adrift from real achievement - of how personality has replaced output as the measure of fame." And this leads him into the sort of analysis that we don't expect in soccer biographies (but this is no mere soccer biography):
"This is a kind of fame that can be - almost always is - conveniently and irretrievably wiped. It is a thin, weightless thing and mostly exists as a series of electronically generated pulses and pixels. Often it is literally without foundation or substance and is typically memorialised as a brand of designer fragrance or on a T-shirt or on a website rather than in the heavy, industrial-age materials of stained glass and granite and bronze. It is an inevitable fallout of the galloping and still ongoing process which has seen the electronic society of the image - the daily bath we all take in the media - replace the real community of the crowd.
"Cyber-age celebrity relates to the kind of old-fashioned renown rooted in genuine public affection and recognised achievement the way the various system-built, semi-prefabricated, part-plastic urban structures we have come to think of as post-modern relate to the heavy Victorian banks, lawyers' chambers and sooty civic buildings that in the great northern cities so often still surround them, like elderly relatives at a rave night."
This is what Burn does best, as well as splicing in quotes from richly literary sources from Martin Amis to Patrick Hamilton and Philip Roth to Don DeLillo, on sport, pubs, fame and other related matters. But the story keeps spiralling back to the title duo, and the final account of Best's decline is horrible and heartstoppingly tragic.
This is a book that will - or should - still be read when the pulped puff-pieces by Cole, Rooney and co are next year's egg cartons. It is a modern masterpiece about the times we live in, now and then.
|
