My Best Books

Viggo Mortensen channels the spirit of Sigmund Freud, Southwark says no to Brit grit, and let’s hear it (again) for Undefeated

Viggo’s Freudian slip

One of the strangest interviews I’ve ever conducted happened last week when I met Viggo Mortensen in Sigmund Freud’s study in London. Viggo, of course, plays Freud in David Cronenberg’s crisp new film A Dangerous Method, and the actor immersed himself in Freud for three months before filming. He’d visited the Freud museum in Hampstead before, but for the purposes of our interview we were allowed behind the velvet ropes and into Freud’s study, right next to the famous couch. Viggo was clearly unsettled by such close contact with Freud’s personal artefacts, and affected some shivers of recognition as he pored over Freud’s notebook which sits on his desk, a pair of fold-up pince-nez placed neatly beside it.

“Ah, I did pretty well then,” nodded Viggo, who’d trained himself to copy the great man’s actual handwriting. As I tried to interview him, Viggo kept jumping up and scanning Freud’s books. “Ah, Shakespeare,” he’d say. “Freud loved Lady Macbeth. Of course, Stefan Zweig. They met regularly.”

The big moment came, however, when Viggo gingerly felt his way towards the couch. As he gently touched it, a PR rushed in: “You can’t lie on that, sorry.” Viggo was crestfallen. The PR lady continued: “Not even David Cronenberg was allowed on there.” That seemed to satisfy Viggo for a moment and he reverted to examining the ancient carved artefacts and sex objects that lie around the study. The room is clearly immaculately recreated in Cronenberg’s film, where Viggo’s Freud conducts long conversations with Michael Fassbender’s Carl Jung.

“Do any of these objects seem familiar from the film?” I asked. “Oh yeah,” said Viggo, grinning. “The penises, we had a lot of those on set.” You can hear the full interview on my Film Weekly podcast next week.

End of Brit grit

Where can British film-makers go now in search of gritty locations for their urban dramas? The question arises as Southwark residents in south London have followed Hackney in the east by banning film crews for reflecting their areas in a poor light on screen. With the Olympics approaching, I understand Hackney’s film officers are refusing requests to any film-makers whose scripts are about hoodies, riots, drugs, council estates and crime. In a report for Radio 4’s Front Row last week, my friend John Wilson revealed that the denizens of the Aylesbury and Heygate estates are fed up with film crews, following the grimy representation of their homes in movies such as Attack the Block, Harry Brown and Shank. Although filming has been a lucrative sideline for Southwark council, the residents’ associations of the estates — currently undergoing demolition — have rebelled, even despite the recent presence of Brad Pitt, filming sci-fi dystopia movie World War Z in what was once called “muggers’ paradise”. But where does that leave our poor social-realist film-makers? Will they have to make nice Richard Curtis-like movies from now on?

Admit defeat

I must apologise for a grave error I made in last week’s article about the Oscar nominations. I confused a pro-Sarah Palin film called Undefeated with another film, also called Undefeated, about a Memphis high school’s American football team, which is the film that has actually been nominated. I hadn’t seen either film at the time of writing, but I’m thrilled to say I have now watched the nominated Undefeated — which hasn’t yet secured UK distribution — and it’s a terrific and inspiring film, with echoes of the great Hoop Dreams. Beautifully directed by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin, it follows three underprivileged players of the Manassas Tigers and their extraordinary coach trying to help them on (and off) the pitch. It’s an excellent sports doc and must have a very good chance of winning the Oscar, although it doesn’t have the wow factor of Pina or the devastating impact of Hell and Back Again.

A first marathon attempt at 58 years old wasn’t enough. He had to run the entire distance wearing a cape. Then again, Michael Cox has never done things by halves

^“DO YOU WANT TO WATCH ME RUN AROUND THE FIELD?” said my dad (who is in the top 10 loudest men in the East Midlands). It was a curious question to be asked by a man in late middle-age, clad in slippers and baggy cords stained with brinjal pickle, and I wasn’t quite sure how to answer it.

Earlier that day, in his north Nottinghamshire kitchen, as 1960s Nigerian pop blasted from his stereo, he’d made a surprise announcement: the following spring, almost two decades after last doing anything vaguely athletic, he would be running the London marathon. “These have come in really handy,” he added, pointing to a pair of trainers he’d bought me 19 years earlier for school PE from the cut-price shoe shop Jonathan James.

During my sporty adolescence, my dad had always been supportive. We’d attended Nottingham Forest football matches, and he’d given me lifts to countless junior golf tournaments, sitting on an umbrella seat in the corner of my eye as I lined up my shots. I know, though, that ultimately he would have rather been at home with his head in a book or painting a snowy landscape. The country of sport – my country – was a foreign one to him.

But now – a time when I’d become less sporty, when my interests (animals, music, the countryside, history) had intersected with his – he’d thrown me a curveball. “I’ve been training around the village,” he explained. I couldn’t help picturing the comedy run he had done to entertain my friends and me when I was young: an action where he pulled his knees up high, and frantically pumped his arms while grinning maniacally. I’d seen him run only a handful of times in recent years and he’d used the same action, presumably no longer for my entertainment. Could it be that, as an entertainer “becomes the mask”, my dad had “become the jog”? And what would his fellow London marathon competitors think about it?

Over the next few months, reports of my dad’s training became a regular feature of my phone calls to my parents. It was clear that he was serious about his marathon plans. There would also be an extra element: he would run in a superhero suit. A superhero suit, moreover, belonging to his own superhero, Johnny Catbiscuit, from the latest of his children’s books, Johnny Catbiscuit and the Abominable Snotmen. During the marathon, Johnny would hand out copies of the book to children in the crowd from a rucksack.

“I’m a bit worried he’s being overambitious,” said my mum. “It’s going to be very heavy.”

“I’ll be fine,” interjected my dad.

My phone calls to my mum are ostensibly one-to-one affairs, but they’re really dysfunctional conference calls, in which my dad will pick up the phone upstairs at various points and add his freestyle jazz input to the conversation. One moment, I’ll be telling my mum about how a thatched cottage near me had caught fire. The next, we’ll both be stunned into silence by a booming voice from nowhere asking, “DOES THAT MEAN IT WAS SEMI-DETHATCHED?”

My dad had always seemed a bit invincible to me: he’d never been subject to headaches like my mum and me. While it was the loudest I have ever witnessed, he has only to my knowledge ever had one cold. But now I suddenly felt aware of his mortality in a new way. Twenty-six miles over hard ground was a big undertaking for a man whose principal recent form of exercise had been throwing his arms about in fury at the heron that ate his koi carp. I asked him if he’d been pacing himself, but he waved the question away. The doctor had told him that it was advisable for someone of his age, with his cholesterol levels, to wear a heart monitor when he ran, and he had promised my mum that he would. “Do you mean it, or are you saying that to keep her quiet?” I asked.

With this latest venture, my dad had ushered in the final stage in a metamorphosis I’d been undergoing for the last couple of years in which I stopped being his son and became his disapproving maiden aunt. I could hear the killjoy nag in my voice as I warned him about overexerting himself, but I couldn’t help it. I was well aware of the all-or-nothing element to his character.

It could have been worse: running wasn’t as risky as potholing or white-water rafting. But my dad’s peculiar brand of hedonism has never manifested itself in the obvious. No drugs, excessive drink or fast cars for him. He prefers the everyday and apparently harmless, and in this way he’s very clever. If you try to sit someone down and tell them that you’re worried that they’ve got a chutney problem, you’re just going to look like a lunatic. Equally, it’s unlikely that anyone has ever successfully staged a salt intervention, and I know I’d be unlikely to break the trend.

I reminded him about the author Douglas Adams, and how he died of a heart-attack on a treadmill, arguably because he had thrust himself so vigorously into exercise after a long hiatus. My dad waved me away. “I’m as fit as a flea. I did 22 miles round the field today! Bloomin’ brilliant it was. I was listening to some Tanzanian hip-hop.”

My worries were exacerbated when my dad fell off a stepladder, sustaining a deep cut and bruises on his leg. That he only sustained these was remarkable, considering that he was wielding a set of whirring hedge clippers and not wearing any form of protective clothing.

“He thinks he’s 26 again right now,” said my mum.

On the day of the marathon, I decided not to join my dad for the start in Greenwich, feeling that he’d be better served by as few distractions as possible. Instead I met my mum near Embankment, for the final stretch.

When I caught up with her, she admitted she was a bit cross. As they’d come up the hill towards Greenwich Observatory, my dad had spotted some people in bibs running, shouted “OH NO! THEY’RE STARTING!” and hoofed it away from her, not giving her time to give him his water bottle, towel or banana. In truth, these people had been running towards the starter’s line, rather than away from it. Panicked, my mum had searched for my dad among hundreds of competitors, and, by an extreme stroke of luck, found him, 10 minutes later, necking a free can of Red Bull.

“Oh, hiya!” he’d said. “I’ve never heard of this stuff before but it’s great. and they’re giving it away free!”

“How many of those have you had?” she’d asked him.

“This is only my fourth!”

“Do you know what’s actually in it?”

“No. What?”

“Well, lots of caffeine, for starters.”

“Oh.”

My mum had next seen him around the 19-mile mark, near Millwall. “How did he look?” I asked. “Kind of out of it,” she said. Since then, she’d tried to contact him on his mobile, to no avail. From Embankment, we watched runners of all shapes and sizes pass us, but no Johnny Catbiscuit. As we waited, my mum told me about the fire alarm going off at 6am in their hotel that morning, the guests having to stand in the car park: everyone in their pyjamas, my dad in a bright orange superhero suit.

And then we saw him. His run was more of a stagger now, not the high-kneed action I’d expected. It had a slight “pretend flying” element to it. This was the home stretch, and, in his own way, he was soaring down it. “Mick!” we shouted, but he was off in some other place. I thought of shouting “Dad!” but the word somehow seemed too puny. Instead, I decided to use the only name that fitted: the one written on his suit. A few other spectators had spotted it too, and now we joined in a chorus. “Come on, Johnny!” we shouted. I considered adding a “You can do it!” but it was clear from the angle of his cape, the far-off, unwavering look in his eyes and his track record as a man of action among the everyday citizenry, that I would merely have been stating the obvious.

• Tom Cox’s latest book, Talk to the Tail, is published by Simon & Schuster.

Fitter, Faster, Funnier Olympics: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Olympics But Were Afraid to Ask by Michael Cox is published by A&C Black on 16 February

Week one: the storyteller

This is a ghost story, so we start with the storyteller. Literary critics rarely use this last term, preferring to talk of the “narrator”. But when it comes to hauntings this traditional description is fitting. Arthur Kipps is giving us a tale that he is condemned by his own memories to tell. When the novella opens, he is a man in late middle age, surrounded by adult stepchildren at Christmas. Naturally they begin to tell ghost stories: Christmas is the time for this, when the year is darkest and family or friends are gathered together to be entertained. For the classic ghost story is a performance. Some of the best ghost stories – The Turn of the Screw is the most famous example – begin with this situation: a person telling a story to a group of rapt listeners. The master of the ghost story, the Cambridge don MR James, used to read his latest compositions out loud to friends before publishing them. (Most ghost stories are novellas or short stories, so that they might be fitted into a single, uninterrupted reading.)

Arthur is too darkly haunted by the story that he has in his head to join in the family game. “I was trying to suppress my mounting unease, to hold back the rising flood of memory.” The Woman in Black shares with many ghost stories a principle of narrative reluctance. The story has to be told, but must be difficult to tell. “I have sat here at my desk, day after day, night after night, a blank sheet of paper before me, unable to lift my pen, trembling and weeping too.”

A ghost comes back from the past, and so does a ghost story. In the opening of this narrative the storyteller talks of coming out “from under the long shadow cast by the events of the past”. At its end, the storyteller has managed a difficult task. Thus the book’s terse concluding sentences: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” You could take this as evidence that a kind of exorcism has been achieved: Arthur himself uses this metaphor for the act of narration. Or you could think that it shows him still possessed by the fears that the story has re-awakened.

As a young man, Arthur, then a junior solicitor in a London law firm, was sent to the remote town of Crythin Gifford to sort out the papers of a recently dead client of the firm, Mrs Alice Drablow. Of course she had lived in a gloomy mansion – Eel Marsh House – cut off from the village by a causeway that is only passable at low tide. Of course the locals are fearful of the place and yet highly reluctant to talk of their fears. Readers will recognise some of the conventional properties of this highly conventional form: the art of the author is to turn our expectations into apprehension. Arthur the storyteller recalls his own youthful scepticism – “I did not believe in ghosts” – but we know that the person who tells the story has been made to think differently.

In a time-honoured generic pattern, this ghost story throws a particular light on the storyteller, asking us to notice not just what happens in his narrative, but what has happened to him. “As a result of the experiences I will come to relate,” Arthur is “prone to occasional nervous illnesses and conditions”. He confesses near the opening of his tale that “for many years now” his spirits have been “excessively affected by the ways of the weather”. Something has happened to him, we infer, to produce this “susceptibility”. It is another way back into the past. For in the story that he eventually tells, the weather will be a disturbingly active element.

In the story, the much younger Arthur stumbles after the truth of the narrative into which he has been thrust. What has happened in this house? What terrible events are recorded in Mrs Drablow’s chaotic papers? In a crucial episode, this stumbling is literal: roused in the night by a child’s cry, he finds himself desperately fumbling after a candle when all the lights in Eel Marsh House go out.

But the real fumbling is that of the storyteller recalling the episode; we experience the drama in the present, as he tries to understand his experiences. He remembers how, in the dark, empty nursery of the house, he felt something worse than terror. “I felt not fear, not horror, but an overwhelming grief and sadness, a sense of loss and bereavement, a distress mingled with utter despair.”

Only at the very end will we find the meaning of this. The proper telling of the story depends upon narrative suppression. As we near the conclusion, Arthur recalls his departure from Crythin Gifford and re-enters his hopeful past self. “Now that the house was empty at last, perhaps the hauntings and their terrible consequences for the innocent would cease forever.” This is the thought of the younger Arthur, not of the man who tells the story. We are briefly to see the blithe optimism of the young man before we find the horrible truth that the older man already knows.

• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Susan Hill for a discussion at 7pm on Tuesday 21 February at the British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1. Tickets £8, online booking only.

Nobel prizewinner who viewed the world through poetry

When Wisława Szymborska, who has died aged 88, received the Nobel prize for literature in 1996, the Swedish Academy stated the following in its citation: “Her poetry … with ironic precision, allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” This aptly sums up the work of a poet whose life spanned the history of Poland in the 20th century and whose detached engagement allowed her to rise above the often turbulent atmosphere of everyday politics.

She was born in Kórnik, western Poland, and moved with her family when she was eight to Kraków, where she went to school and attended the Jagiellonian University, studying Polish literature and sociology. She made her poetic debut in 1945 in the Kraków newspaper Dziennik Polski, but she had to wait until 1952 for her first collection. Subsequently, she regarded this and the collection that followed in 1954, which have been described as socialist realist in style, as largely irrelevant to her later work, although there were indications in them of the ideas she would develop in Wołanie Do Yeti (Calling Out to Yeti, 1957).

The year 1956 in particular marked Szymborska’s departure from earlier socialist hopes and expectations. Her disillusionment can be traced in the savage irony of the poem A Funeral, written upon the reburial of the Hungarian communist László Rajk, who was executed as a Titoist seven years earlier. She remained, however, a Communist party member for another 10 years and gave back her party card only in 1966 in protest against the disciplinary action mounted against the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski when he spoke out against the system.

Szymborska’s next poetry collection, Sól (Salt, 1962), showed her exceptional capacity for combining historical with personal experience, expressed in crisp, often ironic free verse. From 1953 to 1981 she edited the Kraków cultural journal Zycie Literackie where, apart from poems, she also published review articles and feuilletons.

Szymborska kept a low profile throughout the Solidarity period of the early 1980s and the following years of martial law, emerging with a new collection, Ludzie Na Moscie (People on a Bridge) in 1986, with her reputation intact. In this book, one can find the quintessential Szymborska in these lines (translated into English by Stanisław Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh):

A miracle (what else can you call it):
the sun rose today at three fourteen
a.m.
and will set tonight at one past eight

A miracle that’s lost on us:
the hand actually has fewer than six
fingers
but still it’s got more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.
Szymborska was an intellectual poet – someone “who thinks about the world through poetry”, according to the critic Jerzy Jarzebski – but also one whose style is not too obscure for the general reader. Her poems are often humorous descriptions of serious or delicate situations. I particularly like her Cat in an Empty Apartment, voicing the views of an offended cat whose owner fails to return, beginning with the line: “Die – you can’t do that to a cat.” Many years ago in Kraków, when I met Szymborska, she was cradling a cat in her lap and I still own a photograph of the scene.

Szymborska’s many awards included the Kallenbach prize from the Koscielski Foundation (1990) and the Goethe prize (1991). When she won the Nobel prize, she announced that she would distribute the money to social projects, and also observed that two other Polish poets, Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz, might have been chosen, for they equally deserved it. Last year she received the Order of the White Eagle, one of the highest Polish official decorations. Several of Szymborska’s books have been translated into English, the best selection being View With a Grain of Sand (1995).

Her marriage to the poet Adam Wlodek ended in divorce. Szymborska’s longtime partner, the writer Kornel Filipowicz, died in 1990.

• Wisława Szymborska, poet, born 2 July 1923; died 1 February 2012

Plus: Different ways of looking at the second world war; Sherlock and Doctor Who reach stalemate

What is the best last line of a novel?

“‘OK baby, hold tight,’ said Zaphod, ‘we’ll take a quick bite at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.’” – Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; or “One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, ‘Poo-tee-weet?’” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5.

merriman

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which” – George Orwell, Animal Farm.

Jo Baker, Birmingham

The best last line of a novel does not have to be the one that brings some great classic work of fiction to a satisfactory close, but perhaps one that remains forever in the mind simply because the words seem impossible of improvement. I offer three from books I first read in my teens in the 1940s:

“She glanced at the soup plate and, on the chance that it might after all contain something worth inspecting, she balanced herself on her old legs and went to it again.” – Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale.

“It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.” – Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

“A couple giggled in a dark doorway. Someone started a gramophone in the middle of a record, explosively.” – PH Newby, Agents and Witnesses.

Charles Boardman, Nottingham

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Stephen de Winton, Dartford, Kent

It is said history is written by the winners, but how does the teaching of history differ between European nations?

My 10-year-old nephew in San Francisco was asked by his mother what he’d learned at school that day: “The second world war started in 1941,” he answered. The next day his mother queried this with the teacher, who replied: “That’s what the text books say”.

Cherry Lewis, Woodbridge, Suffolk

LotteryLarry asks what wartime exploits the Germans might have made films about (N&Q, 26 January). In 1914 the German cruiser Emden led the Royal Navy a merry dance around the Indian Ocean. She sank many ships, but her captain, Karl von Muller, took care to safeguard the civilian crews, and came to be regarded as a clever and worthy opponent. When HMAS Sydney destroyed the Emden at the Cocos Islands, the Admiralty suggested that Von Muller and his officers should be allowed to retain their swords.

Peter Lowthian, Marlow, Bucks

German war exploits? How about The Great Recapture?

Paul Linden, Cambridge

Sherlock or Doctor Who – who would win in a chess match?

Sherlock would win by faking the suicide of the king, which would turn out to be the disguised body of the knight the Doctor sacrificed earlier.

Poit

Neither, for to meet at all they would need the venue of the Starship Enterprise, where they would be distracted by Spock playing with his renowned three dimensional chess set; their energy would all go in to trying to master that.

Roger Hunt, Dallington, E Sussex

Sherlock Holmes would not have wasted his considerable mental energies on a mere game. Everything he did was with the sole purpose of improving his crime-solving abilities. In A Study in Scarlet he expresses to Watson his ignorance of the workings of the solar system thus: “What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go around the sun. If we went around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

OrigamiPenguin

Any answers?

Is Falstaff’s haunt the Boar’s Head, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, our earliest recorded spoonerism? Brian Clover, London SE13. What happens to our sleep patterns as we get older? At 3am I can tackle Dickens or even A Brief History of Time; but between 9-10pm not even Sherlock can keep me awake. Anne Muers, Leeds.

• Post your questions and answers below or email nq@guardian.co.uk (please include name, address and phone number).

Libraries across the UK face closure: why won’t the government intervene? Shadow arts minister Dan Jarvis has a plan – even if Ed Vaizey doesn’t

National Libraries Day falls this Saturday, but this year the celebrations will be tinged with a deep sense of alarm. The future of libraries is more uncertain than it has been in decades. Almost 600 libraries are currently under threat, as councils are forced to slash spending. Opening hours and book budgets are being reduced. Savings have to be made, but this attack on libraries underestimates their value, and ignores the less destructive alternatives.

Libraries can be real hubs of their communities, responsive to them, helping them to flourish. Reading has to be at the heart of the mix (I don’t buy for a second the idea that books are obsolete). This is all the more important at a time when four million children in the UK don’t own a book, and when as many as one in six adults have trouble reading; illiteracy is thought to cost our economy up to £81bn a year. The benefit of libraries to communities is harder to measure, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes, in libraries large and small, from Barnsley to Bermondsey.

Does this government see it? Libraries minister Ed Vaizey’s stock line has been: “I don’t run library services. Local authorities do.” He has a point: libraries are run by democratically elected local governments, and they take the lead. But that’s no excuse for doing nothing. It may not be Vaizey’s job to micro-manage every library in the country – but it is his job to be their champion. And that is what he is failing to do.

How can he claim otherwise, when he seems happy to leave the courts to do his job for him? Vaizey says he has not intervened because a few authorities have managed to reverse proposals for widespread cuts after a judicial finding against them; therefore, he airily asserts, campaigning works. But what about the places that are not lucky enough to have a cadre of dedicated people who can scrape together the money to mount a legal challenge? What if their case fails, or runs out of funds?

The minister should not leave it to the courts to decide when something has gone wrong. He and his department need to take a view. By law it is he – not hard-pressed, ad-hoc campaigns that tend to be in the more affluent parts of the country – who has ultimate responsibility for libraries.

No minister can seek to prevent all cuts, but they can be engaged and active. They can check that closures don’t happen without due process and consultation, and offer advice on savings, such as streamlining back-office operations or co-locating a library with other services.

Above all, a minister can promote as well as defend the service. Vaizey often says the right thing, but you wonder whether he really gets it. There is plenty of talk about the Big Society, which seems to mean pressuring reluctant community groups into running libraries for free. What is missing is a coherent, long-term vision, a true sense of excitement about the potential of libraries – and, critically, a credible plan for realising it.

As shadow arts minister, I am in the process of developing such a plan. But Vaizey could start with a comprehensive review of how libraries can be plugged in to the wider work of government, through regular engagement between ministers and senior civil servants (currently this discussion happens at a much lower level). He could co-ordinate an overdue marketing effort to boost awareness of libraries among the public. He could fully engage in the fight to prepare libraries for the digital future, instead of scrapping Labour’s plans to extend the Public Borrowing Right to e-books. These steps would require a modest amount of funding, but have a major impact. At present, the Arts Council is valiantly trying to do some of these things, but it is far too little – and for the 75 libraries that have closed in the last 10 months, it is too late.

The current wave of closures should be a call to arms – not because libraries should be exempt from bearing their share of budget cuts (as long as it is a fair share), but because what is happening ignores their enormous value. If this government really believes in the promise of libraries, they must act now.

Memorable and lucid insights into life as a footballer are rare – but here are some compelling fly-on-the-wall accounts

Football clubs are notoriously insular institutions which are difficult for the outsider to penetrate. Even in this age of obligatory interviews, players’ tweets and reams of internet gossip, informed or otherwise, obtaining a true perspective of the workings of a club is hampered by the filter through which the titbits are dispersed. Whether adherence to a code of secrecy has unambiguous motives such as a desire to maintain commercial confidentiality when so many particulars, if made known, are potential weaknesses for rivals to exploit, or more deliberately obstructive, the result more often than not is fundamentally the same: they only tell you what they want you to know.

Little wonder then that there have been so few accounts that have benefited from the privilege of an access-all-areas dispensation. Two players, Eamon Dunphy in 1974’s Only a Game and Garry Nelson with Left Foot Forward 21 years later, have offered humorous, intelligent and outspoken takes on the daily grind of the journeyman’s tribulations as careers in lower division football drew to an end.

Both provided lucid insights into a professional’s mind – memorably describing the joy, anguish and insecurity of their trade – with an authenticity few have subsequently matched. It is a tribute to Dunphy and Nelson that, though they were inside men, their candour and resolve overcame the habitual reticence that preserves the sanctity of their workplace.

The diaries of a season written by those who have never been initiated into the fraternity by dint of their footballing prowess but have nonetheless enjoyed the freedom to gain admittance as an equal are just as rare. Hunter Davies set the benchmark with The Glory Game in 1972, chronicling the fortunes of Tottenham Hotspur from the rigours of pre-season training in which he participated to their victory over Wolverhampton Wanderers in the first Uefa Cup final.

For the first time we witnessed the despair of the defeated player after his mistake had cost his side the game, an emotion he could never show on the pitch. Back in the changing room, after Cyril Knowles’s miskick had led to Chelsea winning a League Cup semi-final, Davies wrote of the sound made by the extractor fan: “Its low, insistent hum seemed to reverberate round the walls, getting louder and louder as if trying to drive everyone mad, an Orwell 1984 room, a torture chamber where everyone is face to face with his worst fears. Knowles seemed to be crying. His eyes were red and swollen. His arms were shaking. No one could look at anyone else.” It is a scene of abject desolation that illustrated how glib the assumption was that the occupational hazards of swings in fortune ends up desensitising players.

There was romance, too, in the tale of Alan Mullery, the club captain, who was shipped out on loan to Fulham after Bill Nicholson had remodelled the midfield without him but was recalled after an injury suffered by John Pratt and scored goals in the Uefa Cup semi-final victory over Milan at San Siro and the decisive one at Molineux in the second leg of the final.

Davies travelled with the fans to away games, journeyed to a match in Nicholson’s car and reported everything he saw and heard. Bob Wilson, then Arsenal’s goalkeeper, reviewed the book for the New Statesman, writing: “His accuracy is sufficiently uncanny to be embarrassing.” Davies did his job so well that it felt unlikely that anyone would ever allow a mole to burrow so deeply into the soul and character of a club ever again. But two decades later Joe McGinniss pulled off the same trick with The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro and accomplished it in style, capturing with wide-eyed enthusiasm a town in the grip of a near religious frenzy leavened by scandal, farce and tragedy.

He owed a debt to John Feinstein, the American author of the bestselling A Season on the Brink, a close-up portrait of the Indiana Hoosiers under their mercurial coach, Bob Knight. Feinstein is also the model for Michael Calvin’s Family: Life, Death and Football, the latest and most extraordinary fly-on-the-wall account of a football club from its grassroots up.

Calvin spent the entire 2009-10 season with Millwall, moving from detached observer to embracing the club and its ethos, and earning the trust of impressively resilient operators such as Neil Harris, David Forde and Paul Robinson, the dressing room “Guvnors”. He talks to the board, staff and at times unforgiving fans, absorbing the culture of Millwall during a season rich in character, drama and plot that ended with promotion to the Championship via victory at Wembley in the play-offs. His exploration of the bonds between community and club and the tireless work done by unsung heroes in making a constructive impact on people’s lives act as a redemption story for an author disillusioned with the modern game. Indeed it transforms him so much, he ends up going native as an adopted son of The Den.

The book is full of remarkable people, none more so than Kenny Jackett, the manager. He radiates hard-bitten wisdom but never loses his compassion even though his competitive edge remains razor-sharp. This inspirational man forces you to put your prejudices about Millwall aside and as the year develops the story becomes the antidote to a sense of disgust with the game and supporters’ alienation from it.

After Davies published The Glory Game 40 years ago, 91 other clubs took fright and thought, “not bloody likely”. It has taken Calvin’s family affair to show that letting daylight in upon the magic can change minds in positive ways.

The philosopher’s plan for secular temples may be a flop, but there is space for creative conversation about the purpose of religion

Religion without faith may seem about as pointless as non-alcoholic beer, but Alain de Botton’s latest project to build a series of secular temples suggests a new mood in the angry standoff between belief and non-belief. Not everyone will agree, of course. Richard Dawkins was characteristically trenchant: “Atheists don’t need temples.” Even so, isolating all the best bits of religion is an interesting exercise. Ritual and ceremony are useful ways of giving structure to our moral commitments. And many see churches and cathedrals as valuable places of community gathering and sources of awe and edification. But all this has been tried before. The French revolution had its temples of reason and Felix Adler’s godless sermon of 1874 inspired a whole movement for ethical societies. De Botton’s project may well be a glorious flop in the making, but there is certainly space for a more creative conversation about the purpose of religion.

How prescient of the Guardian to remember JB Priestley (In praise of…, 27 January). At a time when so many of the postwar institutions that were founded on socialist principles of collective responsibility are being systematically dismantled by the coalition (NHS, welfare state, comprehensive education etc), in favour of Mr Cameron’s creed of selfish individualism, perhaps we should heed the prophetic warnings of the eponymous Inspector in that old warhorse, An Inspector Calls, that “we are responsible for each other. And if men will not learn that lesson, they will be taught it, in fire and blood and anguish.” A case of history repeating itself and testament to the enduring legacy of a true visionary.
Scott Fuller
Bromley, Kent

• May I heartily endorse your comment that JB Priestley is a “writer and a man who is surely ripe for a wider rediscovery”. The JB Priestley Society has been saying exactly so for the past 15 years. It is pleasing that the Guardian, a newspaper Priestley read and admired, has caught on. He was indeed vastly talented and what he wrote and said made a difference. He acquired a wide readership and created a world in his fiction full of warmth and simple values. His strength was a concern and compassion for the condition of the average man and woman. No one summed him up better than Anthony Burgess, who, at the time of Priestley’s death in 1984, wrote: “He was volcanic, fertile, often careless but never dull … I read just about everything he ever wrote, and not for one moment did I ever feel I was wasting my time.”
Lee Hanson
Chairman, JB Priestley Society

Four young converts to Christianity tread a fine line between faith and hypocrisy in this intelligent novel

Four ex-Oxbridge friends in their late 20s are about to become leaders in a church initiative called the Course, a fictional version of the real-life Alpha Course. A religious movement led by a charismatic priest who won’t take no for an answer, the Course becomes a way of life for its young, wealthy followers who are encouraged to bring other hip Londoners into the fold for prayers and fork suppers.

Alex Preston’s follow-up to his well-received first novel, This Bleeding City, focuses on a strange menage a quatre. The alpha Alpha couple in the group are smug marrieds Abby and Marcus. Except that Marcus is secretly miserable, borderline alcoholic and having serious doubts about his faith. And Abby is struggling to cope with the legacy of several miscarriages.

Hovering around the cosy couple since university days are Lee and Mouse, a non-couple. Lee is the girl every man wants to sleep with. Luckily for them, she wants to sleep with every man too – until she discovers the Course and is partially “saved”. Pudgy beta male Mouse is Lee’s reluctant best platonic friend and the only man she won’t sleep with.

At the start, all we know about this group is their devotion to the Course. As events unfold, it becomes clear that they are all confused souls who struggled to cope at university and then clung to each other as life in London became challenging. All four, we realise, have made the wrong romantic choices and are involved with the Course largely to avoid having to face up to this. Amusingly, while Abby, Marcus, Lee and Mouse are supposed to be the “moral leaders” in this world, it takes Rebecca – a young woman who has a drunken fumble with Marcus at a party – to voice what the reader is thinking. “Seriously, you need to get out of the Course,” she tells him. “Those aren’t good people you have been telling me about. You’re better than that.” The trouble is, he actually isn’t and he knows it.

Simmering away in the background is a thriller-style plot about the global ambitions of David, the priest, whom I pictured with the looks of Steve Jobs and the voice of Tony Blair (”It’s so good to have you guys here!”). Everything is at stake for the four young leaders: if they can’t capture the attention of a huge new group of recruits, David’s plans for expansion are doomed. And there is a lot of money and prestige riding on the fate of the Course.

This is a cleverly conceived novel, pitched between commercial and literary. It’s intensely readable and feels honest and authentic in its intentions and execution. But while it’s admirably bold to take on the Christian faith in a contemporary novel, there are problems with this choice of subject. Those who believe in God may struggle with the depiction of the Christian characters, who are almost cartoonishly hypocritical, preaching to others about their “lifestyle choices” (and outlawing homosexuality) but off their faces on merlot half the time, when they’re not sleeping with their best friends’ spouses or getting dodgy “massages”.

On the other hand, non-believers may grow impatient with the intricate descriptions of what goes on at the Course. Some of it is hard to buy into: I could not take seriously the fact that the four main characters were in a Christian pseudo-rock band called the Full Fathom Five (their fifth member, the groovy minister, does a star turn singing in tongues). It’s not always obvious whether Preston is mocking his characters and exposing their flaws or asking us to sympathise with them.

In some ways, this gives The Revelations a pleasing ambiguity. Preston’s characters may be preachy (although they have serious misgivings about whether they believe in what they’re saying) but the novelist himself is not. He lets us form our own conclusions about who is to blame for what. This book is intelligently questioning and analytical about religion generally and Christianity specifically. Despite a moral resolution of sorts at the end, there is no strong sense of a conclusion. This might not be enough for some readers, but luckily I have agnostic tendencies and so felt quite happy with the fence-sitting.