At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that Eleven
Seasons was just another book about a young footy star doing his thing
and discovering more about himself as a result. Sports narratives
generally focus on the triumphalist - a season serves as a mirror,
showing how sticking to your guns/following your heart/never giving up
will see you rise and see success in your life. Makes sense, right? But
this type of story doesn't win a Vogel prize, as Eleven Seasons claim to have done.
In the first few chapters, Eleven Seasons threatens to follow this vein - a moody adolescent lives with his
single mother and sees football as both a passion and an escape from
his miserable everyday life. However littered throughout these opening
stages are hints of things to come, with the casual racism and misogyny
of schoolboys, the class boundaries and the undercurrents of 'macho
culture' that is already rearing its ugly head in the seemingly
innocent world of schoolboy footy. What follows promises to serve as a
juicy juxtaposition between To Kill A Mockingbird and Specky
Magee...
Initially, we are immersed in the mind of an incommunicative
teenager, confused about his lot in life and certain about just one
thing - he was put on the earth to play football. It appears as though
he is only fully worthy on the field and without it, things would
become unstuck. As the book progresses, however, it becomes apparent
that football can as much break a man as it can make it man - indeed,
the 'football culture' is responsible for a dark secret in his mother's
life, one which consumes Jason some years later. Football, the
stresses of his day-to-day reality and self-expectations and a new
group of 'cool' friends are responsible for his gradual decline,
resulting in ejection from the very team he idolised and fought to hard
to be a part of. From this point, the hinted inevitabilities are
realised and Jason descends into a dark spiral of parties and drugs
which results in the disintegration of his relationship with his mother
and throws his future and everything he has strived for into doubt. At
this point, you don't know whether to feel sorry for Jason or to
scream at him to realise the consequences of his actions and to stop
being such a narrow-minded boofhead.
When Jason returns in part 2 after
a few lost years in the Gold Coast, he is still firmly entrenched in
the male-worshipping culture that surrounded him in his adolescence,
although this half of the book concerns him trying to make amends and
trying to get his life back on track. He is still haunted by the
remnants of his past life, but is focused on righting the wrongs and
doing the best he can with the opportunities he is given. Football now
returns as a medium by which to achieve this and while he does not
quite rekindle his former passion, it certainly serves as an important
part of his life - after all, it is all he knows. This part of the
story becomes either 'nice' or 'soft' (depending on your mindset), as
Jason attempts to fix his broken life and heal old wounds, including
re-establishing his relationship with his mother. it is a mark of Paul
D. Carter's skill that he is able to write about Jason in a way that is
both accessible and understandable, as we are let deep into his
tortured mind and even start to feel a little sorry for him. We begin
to understand his predicament, its affects on his behaviour and the
complexities of the adolescent mind are made clear. As a teenager
reading the book, I was very impressed by Carter's ability to get
inside Jason's head and accurately present the tangled rush of emotions
and changes that occur during adolescence.
Even though this book
appears to be aimed towards a young adult market, it has much to offer
adult readers with a taste for thoughtful fiction about emotions and
relationships in the vein of Elliot Perlman or Julian Barnes. Certainly
it presents sides of the sporting culture and brute facts about
growing up that are often ignored, un-noticed or hushed away, bringing
to the fore the fragility of the 'football fantasy' and the destructive
facets of this fantasy world. It is no small testament to Carter's
abilities that he has been able to explore these issues in a book that
even Jason would finish.
Eleven Seasons? Eleven fast-flowing chapters
- a river sometimes smooth, sometimes turbulent, but constantly
engaging.
-Angus
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