The Observer's Will Buckley is delighted to find that old friend Joseph O'Neill has completed his novel, and even more so because "cricket is integral to the plot".
So it was I read that on the cover of theSunday Book Review there was a review of Netherland by Joseph O'Neill, by Dwight Gardner. It described O'Neill's book as 'the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.'
This would be the Joe, born in Ireland and raised in Holland, who had moved to New York a decade ago and with whom I had been friends for years. The Joe who batted first wicket down for the Royal Burundi cricket team - an XI with an undistinguished record, at their least dangerous when on tour. A nadir occurred during a match at Joe's club, Den Haag, when we were beaten by a bunch of girls.
About the novel, Buckley writes…
Netherland looks as if it might top the lot. Here he is on New York cricket: 'This degenerate version of the sport - bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it - inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.'
Click here to read the New Yorker's review of the same book.
