I recently read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs. As an American expatriate living in Britain in the 1980s, he became fascinated with the football hooligan culture and decided to investigate and document it firsthand. His book is elegant and profane and visceral and terrifying.
Apparently Buford is friends with Salman Rushdie; personally, I think Buford's the better writer. His style is immediate. The book is over 300 pages long, fairly compact print on broad pages, but it reads quickly. There are no extraneous words. When Buford's material demands brutality, he's uncompromisingly brutal; when it demands compassion, he complies.
In England, fans of football (soccer, in the U.S.) like to riot on match days (Saturdays). Fans of the Manchester United, Chelsea, West Ham, and whatever other clubs go to matches ostensibly to watch the games, but more often than not to participate in crowd violence. Some of it is chilling; most of it is grotesque; one or two andecdotes in this book are simply incredible. The firms (as the gangs of fans, or supporters, are called) clash and battle with each other, with the police, and with public and private property.
Some of the thugs are National Front skinhead neonazis, some are jobless kids, some have families, good jobs, and plenty of money. Individually, many of them are benign, non-violent members of society who've never done jail time and simply fancy a bit of fun. Together, they become an engine of destruction, a single, mindless, chaotic entity. This is what the book is really about.
Buford's conclusions are frankly astonishing. He offers no evidence of any religious background or conviction, but by the time he's become sick of the violence near the end of the narrative he's arrived at a shockingly Christian conclusion: there is no socio-political or socio-economic impulse or excuse for the crowd violence among England's hooligans—there's no reason for what they do other than the human propensity to sin.
He doesn't put it in those words, of course. He calls it human nature. But what is human nature except rebellion against God? It is fleshly nature, sin nature, and there is no excuse or reason for it except man's continual quest for autonomy. Crowd violence, Buford asserts, is always mindless. To the extent that all sin is foolishness, I couldn't agree more.
Don't read this book if you have a weak stomach or an aversion to graphic depictions of violence. If you can handle it, however, Among the Thugs is one of the most penetrating deconstructions of the true nature of fallen man at his most ungoverned you're likely to encounter.
Interesting...how sure are you that we NEED a penetrating deconstruction of the true nature of fallen man at his most ungoverned?
ReplyDeleteI've a bit of an aversion to graphic depictions of violence so I'll probably be skipping. But I do tend to question endorsing a book because it's a good picture of sinfulness. Don't we get this on a daily basis? But perhaps it's not quite what you are saying.
I like the point made by Berlinerin--we do see pictures of sinfulness on a daily basis. I wonder, however, if this is the very reason why at least some of us need the occasional graphic reminder. The quotidian, mundane nature of sin sometimes gives the illusion of mitigating its depravity. The graphic example or the penetrating deconstruction remind me of the gravity of all sin, great or small. I suppose that not all Christians experience this the same way.
ReplyDeletehmmm, good point.
DeleteLet me clarify: Buford is not gratuitous at all. While his descriptions are graphic, they don't control the book; he spends much more time examining philosophical and socio-political factors than wallowing in violence.
ReplyDeleteAlso, he's clearly disgusted by the violence. It's easy to dissociate violence from real life—movies that everyone loves are often filled with horrific gore and violence, yet viewers far too frequently put those films in a different category than actual violence.
Finally, I guess what I liked most about Buford's expose was his realization that humans are simply wicked creatures. Most non-Christian writers, and way too many Christian writers, try to explain away or find root causes for wrongdoing that can only be properly explained by the universality of sin. Buford isn't a Christian, but confronted by the reality of evil, he assumes a fairly Christian stance. I'm not saying everyone should read this book, but I am saying that it's a voice in the wilderness that, due to its subject matter, has some potential for reaching the people it needs to.
Ok, that makes more sense. The way he explains evil/wickedness is more "Christian" than you had anticipated. I could get behind that.
DeleteThat's about the long and the short of it. :)
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