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Netherland: ideal read for Ashes rain breaks

By Matt | July 1, 2009

A strong shortlist for the 2008 William Hill Sports Book of the Year was ultimately won by Marcus Trescothick’s autobiography Coming Back to Me.But a long-time favourite in the betting odds, Netherland,by Joseph O’Neill, is a must-read novel for anyone who wants to see beyond leather-on-willow clichés of cricket as a game for gentle idling on English village greens – and ideal reading for Ashes rain breaks.

At its simplest, Netherland is a tale of marginalised outsiders who play with differing fantasies of cricket in post-9/11 New York. Hans van den Broek is a well-off city analyst who turns out for the Staten Island Cricket Club, the only Dutchman in a ramshackle collection of West Indian and East Asian immigrants.

He is seeking to make sense of his life after his English wife heads home to London with their toddler son in the psychologically grim aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, which have forced the van den Broeks out of their home and disrupted their lives.

Through the cricket club Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian, US resident and small-time gangster. Chuck has a plan to turn a disused minor airfield into an international cricket stadium and thus re-introduce cricket to the United States. His idea, never more than a grandiose pipe dream, is destined not to get off the ground; the story opens with Hans finding out that Chuck has been murdered.

Hans tells the twin stories of his relationship with Chuck and his largely passive role in his reunion with his wife and son as a long interior monologue, with digressions interrupting recollections and in turn making way for introspection and theorising. Such action as there is comes from the larger-than-life Chuck and a host of smaller characters; Hans, an analyst outside as well as in the office, seems paralysed to do anything but watch through a grim cloud of depression as the world – or at least George W Bush’s USA – falls apart.

But through Hans’s recollections, the reader senses that Hans’s trauma is only ostensibly connected with the 9/11 attacks. His father was killed when he was two years old and we learn that, a year before the twin towers went down, his mother died. It is this latter event that has dislocated Hans from life, and the novel covertly deals with his adjustment to it.

Without wanting to make the novel seem too obviously Freudian – it is, in fairness, much more subtle – Mrs van den Broek looms over Hans’s obsession with cricket. She used to watch Hans play for the local team in Holland when he was a child; he remembers how he found her watching them play without him when he was older; the discovery seems to trigger a sense that something but him should be at the centre of her world.

Cricket as a symbol for family
Cricket, for him, is a symbol for family: the fatherless boy Hans found a surrogate family in the local cricket club, with Mother watching; the wifeless and motherless man Hans finds it on Staten Island. Cricket for him is a soporific influence; it lends itself to self-analysis and introspection – his strengths and, evidently, his weaknesses.

For the Trinidadian Chuck, cricket is something else; it is a way to create an identity for himself as another kind of alienated alien in the chaos of New York’s underbelly. West Indian international cricket rose to world dominance as the Caribbean islanders’ way of sticking two fingers up at the imperial Massa, and social historians of cricket will see in Chuck the same drive to make his mark on the world’s consciousness.

Chuck, as much as Hans, sees cricket as a surrogate for family; he lost his hero, his brother, in childhood, and is unable to commit himself wholly to his wife (believing it isn’t fair to burden all a man’s needs on one woman). But he also finds family, like F Scott Fitgerald’s Great Gatsby, in shady eastern European gangsters, which leads to his eventual death.

If you build it, they still won’t come
Ultimately, Netherland suggests that cricket has no place in the USA. Hans goes back to England to win back his family; Chuck’s dreams of intercontinental cricketing harmony founder with his body in a New York canal; even if you build it, they still won’t come, the novel hints.

If Netherland has a fault it lies perhaps in its trying to be too many things. There are livelier studies of the underbelly of American society (Neil Gaiman’s American Godsbeing a personal favourite) and many better studies of psychological breakdowns. And despite comparisons, it’s certainly no modern-day Great Gatsby.

That said, it is a far better cricket novel than, say, Shoeless Joe(the novel that Field of Dreams was based on) is a baseball novel, and should have won the William Hill award. While Marcus Trescothick’s book is undeniably a good personal story, and a fascinating insight into the world of professional cricketers, Netherland should come to be seen as something more. It transcends cricket – a game that can itself seem to transcend human experience – and can be called a truly great novel.

Buy Netherland from Amazon now.

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