Extract from Cricket Across Dark Waters by Arunabha Sengupta
Cricket in Novel Lines
The year 2008 saw the publication of Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel Netherland. Misleadingly named, and set mostly in New York, it is a superb cricket-themed work of fiction. The story is about a Dutch hero indulging in cricket in New York played by Indian, Pakistani and West Indian immigrants. He also befriends an ethnic Indian from Trinidad, with fingers in multiple pies and grand vision of international cricket in New York.
Incidentally, years after his international umpiring days, Steve Bucknor now turns out to officiate in league cricket matches in the Van Cortland Park in Bronx, played by teams comprising South Asian and Caribbean expats.
Two years after the publication of Netherland, Shehan Karunatilaka published Chinaman, an accomplished cricket novel which won the Commonwealth Book Prize. The author went on to win the Booker prize for his subsequent novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
However, writing an introduction for the British Library Crime Classics edition of Adrian Alington’s humorous 1939 novel The Amazing Test Match Crime, journalist and cricket writer Marcus Berkmann starts with the eternal whine, ‘It pains me to say so, but most cricket novels simply aren’t very good. Given the astonishingly high standard of so much cricketing non-fiction, you would expect at least one of our most eminent novelists to regard this as a challenge, but as yet there has been no Ian McEwan novel set at Lord’s, or an Ali Smith state-of-the-nation tale based on a wet Thursday in May at Northamptonshire County Ground.’
Berkmann is not alone in this regard. It is the perennial whine heard across cricket book review and discussion boards in England … ‘well-read’ blokes wondering when someone will finally write the ‘great cricket novel’.
After all Joseph O’Neill is not English or Australian. He is Irish, and he writes about a Dutch hero playing cricket in New York alongside Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians. These are too many stumbling blocks. Besides, the photographs in Chuck Ramkissoon’s office are not of the social-media-taggable English cricketing knights Boycott and Botham, but of Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara. The only English cricketer mentioned in the entire book is Monty Panesar. It is tantamount to blasphemy. And Karunatilaka is from far-off Sri Lanka – not even an Englishman writing about Sri Lanka which would have perhaps made it kosher. Heck, even Brian Lara’s life is better served in attractive garnishes of English Chronicles.
There have been other writers of sterling pedigree, such as Sam Selvon (The Cricket Match), Errol John (Moon on a Rainbow Shawl), R.K. Narayan (Swami and Friends), Cyril Dabydeen (Faster they Come), George Lamming (The Emigrants and In the Castle of My Skin) and quite a few others who have frequently written delightful fiction about cricket or inserted the game into the bigger canvas of their works. However, they were not Englishmen. And neither was the cricket about Test matches at Lord’s – preferably against Australia – or some lazy afternoon spent in a county ground with the church in the background.
In 1991 the Dutch author Ian Buruma wrote Playing the Game – a mischievous politically-charged novelised account of the KS Ranjitsinhji-CB Fry interactions in which cricket sizzles while the Indo-British relations are dealt with in an insightful, multi-dimensional manner. But that is hardly known in cricketing circles while the Cardus account “Ranji, Fry and Sussex”, with its manufactured and incorrect Wainright quote, is much closer to the heart of cricket ‘readers’.
Salman Rushdie – another stalwart writer who creates the curious cricketing character Raman Fielding in The Moor’s Last Sigh and has a young Saleem Sinai journeying from the cramped quarters of a washing chest to find himself at the crease with Polly Umrigar at the Brabourne Stadium in Midnight’s Children – puts this characteristic succinctly in the words of Whiskey Sisodia in Satanic Verses: ‘The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means.’ Not only history but literature also falls into the same abyss.
The Zenith for these blokes will remain set in line with the rather commonplace 1924 novel The Cricket Match by Hugh de Selincourt. Time has not moved. England and Australia are still the only ones playing cricket.
And the bit about “the astonishingly high standard of so much cricketing non-fiction” – it is manufactured consensus in a closed echo-chamber of people who read tweets and flip through books on The Ashes and County Cricket to look at photographic plates of their boyhood heroes. Else a domain so one-dimensional and limited in its periphery cannot be granted such sterling accolades.
Extract from Cricket Across Dark Waters by Arunabha Sengupta