There he was, the civilised and sophisticated American editor of the successful literary magazine Granta, minding his own business on a cold Saturday evening on the platform of a Welsh railway station when he happened to witness England's coarsest: a packed-to-the-gills football special taken over by Liverpool fans, singing raucously, destroying gratuitously and generally defying any efforts to stop them. His subsequent journey to London was one continuous encounter with this "mob" in action. Though his English friends were unsurprised by his story, to the native American it was a revelation (and an inspiration) which was to take him subsequently the length and breadth of the country as well as into Europe, often travelling with the most notorious fans, in search of the meaning of football hooliganism. The result was this fairly unstructured and somewhat rambling piece of first person reportage laced with bits and pieces drawn fairly randomly from a limited reading of some of the relevant academic literature on crowd psychology and the sociology of football hooliganism - and, on publication, the sort of media attention that those who have been researching the area for so much longer than Buford would kill for.
Though Bill roams far and wide, his object of attention - the violence - remains constant. His desire to experience it firsthand pushed him constantly to the danger zones to where, as he was gradually to discover for himself, the risk and exhilaration of the potential transgression of civilised conduct (not the prior ingestion of pints and pints and pints of booze), constitutes the real intoxicant. Perhaps inevitably, after many near misses the violence he so desperately sought eventually found him; in the guise of three truncheon-wielding Italian cops in Sardinia, not opposing hoolies. The thoroughness of this pasting seemed to have a sobering effect; what was intoxicating became mere wasteful stupidity, exhibiting all the pointlessness of a post-party hangover, so Bill decided to call it a day, doubtless a sadder but wiser man. Question is, are we any the wiser as a result of Bill's travail-laden travelogue?
The truth is that it is hard to say. We are introduced to a motley and rather exotic array of contemporary male youth, capable only of displaying exaggerated, ornate versions of what was once working-class culture - tubby Mick the walking gullet, the eccentric, unclassifiable DJ, the ultra xenophobe Grimsby, the elusive leader of the troops Steamin' Sammy, and many others. We are invited to bear detailed witness to a variety of dos and near dos - the taking of Turin, being taken by West Ham, failing to connect with the Tottenham supporters, managing to evade the police and connect with Chelsea's crew and so on. And we are offered a series of reflections on the nature of violence and its appeal: the power the disenfranchised feel in putting the fear of God into the privileged, the intensity of feeling in losing oneself and becoming part of something larger and more powerful, namely, a crowd, the compelling exhilaration of collective acts of transgression such as crowd violence, the constant need of mindless Nationalists to prove their cultural superiority and the retributive violence of young men responding to insults, real or imagined. The trouble is that it is not clear what it all adds up to. This is partly a result of Buford's preference for descriptive narrative over analysis - what, not why questions. It is also a function of his "lit crit" starting point: the idea that absolute fidelity to the felt experience of one highly developed moral sensibility, namely his own, is the route to knowledge, rather than the felt experiences of the subjects of the research, which would tend to be the starting point of social science-based ethnographers. It is astonishing how little we learn from the participants of their thoughts and feelings at critical moments, even if only as a check on Buford's own. And despite the occasional reference to lad culture the question of gender is never raised specifically, though Buford's entire cast, aside from the odd girlfriends tagging along, is male.
But perhaps the real problem is Bill's schizoid relationship with violence. As an experiencing insider, he is rapturous in its praise: "Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and ... one of the most intense pleasures ... I felt, as the group passed over its metaphorical cliff, that I had literally become weightless ... what was it like for me? An experience of absolute completeness." As a witnessing outsider, his critical moralistic hat is replaced: "This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it used violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell." Both sentiments strike me as the exaggerated affectations of a literary man out of his depth. But perhaps their very contradictoriness points to something important, namely, a deep cultural ambivalence towards violence. How gender-specific that ambivalence might be is an interesting starting point for someone.
Tony Jefferson
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