Off Side
By Manuel Vazquez Montalban
Serpent's Tail, 1996. 275 pp.
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/15588
In the hands of a writer of critical social awareness, the detective novel can be an effective window on the greed, hypocrisy, violence and related vices of capitalism.
One could expect that Manuel Vazquez Montalban, writer of detective fiction and one-time member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Catalonia in Spain, should score with his latest novel about murder and speculative land deals in Spanish soccer. Unfortunately, he meanders about on the field and muffs his kicks.
In 1988, Spain's famous Barcelona football club signs champion English centre forward Jack Mortimer, who begins to receive death threat letters.
The less prestigious Fourth Division club, Centellas, also signs a centre forward, Palacin, a star in his day, now fading with a dicky knee, personal problems and a recently acquired cocaine habit.
Pepe Carvalho, private detective and former Communist, hired by Barcelona FC to investigate the death threats, smells a rat — a land-grab operation by the chairmen of Barcelona FC and Centellas FC, and their business colleagues, to kill off the ailing Centellas, a historic working class club, and rezone its prime land for residential development for the nouveau riche Catalan petit-bourgeoisie.
Hiring the clapped-out centre forward as the last great hope for Centellas and then waiting for his failure, or inducing it by paying a team-mate to damage his shonky knee or setting up a drugs scandal — the villains in business suits will do whatever it takes to make their fortune from land speculation.
The plot denouement, I leave for the reader as the major interest of the novel. There is not much else going for it — characterisation is shadowy and sometimes implausible (a literary deconstructionist police inspector), sub-themes (social class and privilege) are raised but fitfully so, humour is attempted (soccer coaching by formulae) but with only partial success.
The biggest failing, however, is political. Carvalho smells a criminal rat but doesn't pursue it: the crooks win, innocents are framed.
The mood is one of decay, death and the loss of moral value. Very gritty, very noir. No socialist heroics, no Philip Marlowe liberal-cynicism-with-innate-sense-of-justice fills the shoes of Pepe Carvalho.
Carvalho is "an increasingly passive spectator of his own time", despondently musing on the "progressives of the mid sixties and seventies, who now sported white hairs in their beards and moustaches and who had that look of poor souls who have been betrayed by history".
Abandon all social and political hope, ye who enter the world of Montalban. Ernest Mandel, detective fiction buff and Marxist revolutionary, wrote that Montalban's detective novels "are soaked in an atmosphere of spleen, scepticism and fin-de-siecle ennui, very significant as the background of a whole layer of intellectual Eurocommunists". Nicely tucked into the back of the net, Ernest.
Montalban, on the other hand, can see the enemy target but hits his limp shots wide of the goals.
Off Side is indeed off side with anyone wanting entertainment, instruction about economic crooks and social vandals, or progressive political inspiration.