Complex, clueless characters on crazy quests

SOMETIMES I spend a whole week reading one book. Not because it's thick but because it challenges me, sets my mind wandering, makes me think, and makes me read paragraphs over and over.

Such a book was Godwin by Joseph O'Neill. I was on the road for a few days and there was much that distracted me and kept me occupied, but in between everything the book's essence lingered, like the memory of a dream.

O'Neill was born in Ireland and grew up in Mozambique, Iraq and the Netherlands. He worked as a barrister in England before moving to New York. His two previous novels were longlisted for the Booker Prize and garnered quite a few other prizes. His short stories and nonfiction appear regularly in the New Yorker and other reputable publications.

If he reminds me of a local writer, it would be Ingrid Winterbach or SJ Naudé. In writing classes, you're told that characters need to have a clear drive or motivation, something they desire or crave. Characters in these authors' books don't always know what they want, they don't have a five-year plan, they waddle on and things happen to them, they're helpless and docile, like sleepwalkers.

This applies to one of the main characters in Godwin, Mark Wolfe. This is how a colleague sums him up: “Wolfe was self-absorbed, yes, but not without compassion when he escaped the cloud of preoccupation that followed him everywhere. I placed him in that class of sensitive intellectuals who are vulnerable to confusion.”

O'Neill is especially masterful at painting selfish, malignant characters such as Wolfe's mother. She is beautiful and ice-cold, and left him with his father when she ran away with another man. She married three men and inherited wealth from all of them, even bagging Wolfe's inheritance. He was his father's only child, and when his father died his parents had long been divorced. Lawyers informed him a large sum was coming to him, millions, but somehow his mother intercepted it. His half-brother is greedy and selfish like their mother, an opportunist and user who always harbours a get-rich-quick scheme on others' account.

Wolfe is a lovable character, at once clueless and thoughtful. He is a technical writer at a company. His boss, Lakesha Williams, is the second narrator in the book. She allows us to see Wolfe from the outside. She is sceptical of him at first, but a strange understanding develops between them. She started the company and works for a negligible salary to assure other technical writers a safe work environment, yet employees begin to conspire against her and execute a hostile takeover.

Wolfe is a thinker with attention deficit disorder, and his chaotic inner monologue is poignant. He has few illusions about himself; instead, he is self-deprecating and grateful that his wife loves him. Then his lazy half-brother gets into trouble and he takes leave to assist him in France. He is drawn into a wild goose chase.

His brother, meanwhile, is an agent for footballers and he gets hold of a video of a particularly promising, bright young footballer named Godwin, playing somewhere in Africa. The scheme is to “sell" him to one of the big European clubs at a huge commission. Wolfe has to see an ex-footballer and colourful talent scout to find out where the player is. He pays for his own travel and accommodation and is never compensated by his brother. Moreover, he is taken for a ride by Lefebvre, the cantankerous old scout.

Meanwhile, things go wrong at work. Lakesha is persistently undermined by a talentless but ambitious troublemaker of a colleague playing a strategic game. Lentil is another memorable negative character. Here's how Lakesha describes her:

She involved herself in other folks’ business. She passed the time with intrigue … What is at issue is a certain kind of personality – the unbalanced person convinced that they are suffering at the hands of unfair and always hidden powers. This sort of person only finds their balance in opposition to another. It is in their nature to see threats everywhere. If they don’t face real threats, like running out of money or losing their homes and finding themselves in a shelter, or loved ones dying – they will imagine threats. I have an unscientific thought about this; if you didn’t grow up with love, you are always unbalanced.

Wolfe also reflects on negative people and the fact that all a mean person needs is a keyboard:

And who isn’t vicious? It’s the capacity for viciousness that separates humans from the animals. Historically, the reach of our malice was limited by physical space. You could hurl a spear, or shout an insult, only so far. Now a rotten tomato can be thrown from any distance, to indelible effect.

The novel is also a hymn to soccer, a reflection on this game that captivates the whole world. The eccentric and talkative Lefebvre postulates about fear as part of the game:

Fear of losing matches, fear of losing one’s job, but also this fear: of losing one’s footballing intuitions. A match of football … is a highly complex and unstable event, like the crashing of the sea onto rocks. One minute you understand, you see the harmony, the next minute you cease to understand, you see only chaos.

The book has much to say about refugees, about the harshness and destructive power of Africa. The complexities of office politics are exploited. And the harebrained schemes of serial entrepreneurs bouncing from one ill-advised plan to another. The beauty of football.

It's one of those wonderful, winding novels with a storyline that turns off and has a picnic at every detour. It's not black and white like thrillers, it's shaded like the spectrum, it's messy like real life where people colour across the lines. It's imperfect and miraculous. I'll have to read it again.

Godwin by Joseph O'Neill was published by HarperCollins and costs R470 at Exclusive Books.

Another interesting read: Amen: Grassroots Football by Jessica Hilltout.

What are we listening to?

Black wolf howls to the thunder:

♦ VWB ♦

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