When he was a boy, Mal Peet’s love of both football and books made him something of a rarity among his peers. These days, he aims to bridge the perceived divide between the two activities in his work.
His success in doing so can be measured not just by the critical acclaim his books receive, but by the letters he gets, both from readers surprised to enjoy a book about football and from non-readers surprised to enjoy a book at all.
‘Most football books for kids are just primitive narratives,’ he explains. ‘A lot of books about football are about what happens, not about what it feels like. I want to convey the experience of what it felt like to actually play, and to care.'
'I want to convey the experience of what it felt like to actually play football, and to care.'
Peet weaves elements of the supernatural into his first two football books, Keeper and The Penalty. In Exposure, which is based on Othello, he abandons the magic in favour of realism, with a focus on celebrity culture and the price of fame. The resemblance between footballer Otello and his pop singer wife Desmerelda to Posh and Becks is immediately apparent to the reader, and deliberately so.
‘A few years ago David got into a bit of hot water. He’d been scoring from outside the penalty area, so to speak, and there was a huge media attack on them as a family. I happen to like Beckham. I was really taken aback by the frenzy of this media invasion, not just of him, but of his wife and his kids: the exposures in the paper and the paparazzi in the lavatory, and the kids smuggled in darkened cars, and all that kind of stuff.
'I just thought, the benefits of fame are considerable, but that’s not one of them. That must be really really scary. So I started thinking about writing about a celebrity at that point.’
The connection to Shakespeare came about almost by accident: before thinking of the celebrity idea, Peet had noticed that the names of some of Shakespeare’s characters sounded like football players. Eventually he put two and two together.
'David and Victoria were very unlikely Shakespearean characters'
‘Because David and Victoria were very unlikely Shakespearean characters, I had this idea that it would be interesting if I could cast that kind of character in Shakespearean roles because it would be kind of ironic and an interesting thing to do.
'I chose Othello because it’s Shakespeare’s only domestic tragedy; there’s very little that happens that’s outside that marriage and that break. It’s very claustrophobic. I wanted to get the claustrophobia of fame into the book.’
The opulence of Otello and Desmerelda’s world is counterpointed by a moving parallel plot about the struggle of three street children, Bush, Bianca and Felicia, to survive in a world of violence and abject poverty.
Peet included their story, not to put forward a moral viewpoint, but for stylistic reasons. ‘I was thinking in terms of colour or tone, or some abstract compositional stuff like that. It needed the contrast. The idea of these two worlds in collision was much more interesting than either of them not. So it was a design issue rather than a meaning issue.
‘That other world of Bush and Bianca and Felicia, and Fidel, the lowlife, that’s straight from Shakespeare as well. He always has that interesting class conflict in his plays between the aristocratic characters and the mechanicals or the clowns or the peasantry or the whores and innkeepers. So I thought I’d use that as well.’
At first glance the novels appear to be set in Brazil, but there are clues that they are not. Although the South American setting is based loosely on the country, it is very much a product of the author’s imagination, and it serves a symbolic purpose as well as a functional one.
‘I didn’t want it to be identified as a particular place. Also, I use it in a way as a metaphor for the USA. The whole thing about the north-south divide and the racial stuff, in a way it was the United States of my growing up in the 50s and 60s: the north and south, the black and white, and it being two different countries.
'So it’s imaginary and metaphorical. It also means I can do what I like. If it was a real place I’d have to conform to authenticity, and life’s too short.’
As in his first two football novels, Peet is preoccupied with the impact of history on the present day, but instead of embedding the idea thematically, as he does in the earlier works, he makes the point structurally in Exposure.
‘Another way of saying that thing about our connectedness to the past would be to use a Jacobean stage play to write a twenty-first century novel, which is why I left the ribs and bits of the play visible. There’s a cast of characters at the front, and I use bits of stage direction and dialogue and I’ve done acts instead of sections, and so on.
'I wanted to signal that I wasn’t trying to sneak a rewrite of Othello past the reader and I wanted to clearly announce what I was doing by using the same names as much as possible. And I also wanted to make that point about literature being built upon previous literatures.’
'I wanted to make that point about literature being built upon previous literatures’
The thread that connects the otherwise discrete football stories is the character of sports writer Paul Faustino. Peripheral to the main action in Keeper, Faustino has evolved into an increasingly complex character over the three novels, and a more active one; in Exposure, in which he plays more of a central role, glimmers of idealism begin to appear as the journalist’s cynical exterior slowly breaks down. Surprisingly, the character was an afterthought.
‘He was simply not there for the first draft of Keeper, or maybe even the second draft. It was only when I had really finished it that I realised that I needed two voices in the book. I had written it as a straightforward narrator-to-reader narrative, but it occurred to me that I really needed that interlocutary voice because the story was preposterous.
'What I needed was somebody to prevent the reader from saying “This is preposterous” by saying “This is preposterous.”’
Peet came across the name on a bottle of Spanish wine and realised that it was perfect for his character. ‘It means “little Faust” or, sort of “minor league Faust”. So instead of making pacts with the devil, he just gets involved in things he didn’t ought to, which is a kind of minor way of being Faustian.
'In a sense he’s often looking for a story, though, so he gets into deep water sometimes doing that. So it’s a nice jokey name. And I kind of like the guy. He’s a sort of cliché in a way, or at least a stereotype, of the sort of curmudgeonly investigator.
'He’s certainly a nod towards all those heroes I read as a kid, like Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe. He’s a stock character in many ways, but it’s quite nice to use a stock character to bounce the more inventive stuff off in a way.’
‘I’m also quite interested in exploring him as a person. In Keeper he’s really a way of getting the story told, and then in The Penalty he becomes much more deeply involved and his scepticism is peeled away.
'And again, in Exposure he’s much more of a main player than an unwilling witness. At the beginning he’s got a very condescending attitude towards Bush. It’s like he’s a pet. He tosses him a coin and jokes with him in that condescending way that we’re all familiar with. But then it tips over into actual caring. He’s a softie, really.’
A friend of both Otello and the street children, Faustino is the character that enables the two plots to come together. For four of Exposure’s acts, the footballer’s story broadly follows the action of Shakespeare’s play, but Peet departs from it in the final act.
‘The final awfulness of Othello hinges on a stolen handkerchief, and as a plot device for a twenty-first century teenage reader… they probably wouldn’t know what a handkerchief was, and, a used tissue? I thought - probably not. I don’t want to go there.
'So I started to think he’s going to have to be framed by Diego/Iago, and he’s going to have to be framed by something big and nasty that teenagers would understand about, so I thought of internet porn. Then it occurred to me that that’s how the two plots of the novel would meet. I also had in mind that for somebody who was actually truly famous and a major celebrity, a fall into obscurity is probably a fate worse than death, so that seemed to me a better way to go.’
'For somebody who was actually truly famous and a major celebrity, a fall into obscurity is probably a fate worse than death.'
The ending of the novel may not be an unmitigated tragedy, but it is full of ambivalent emotion and ends left untied. No obvious motive is given for the actions of Diego, and he remains unpunished. Peet enjoys loose ends, but he believes that, in a teenage novel, such an inconclusive ending is something of a risk.
‘I didn’t want neat stitching at the end of it. But I think teenagers do like to be able to explain to themselves what’s happened. So it’s certainly a breaking of the rules to have a very influential character whose actions are not adequately explained.
'And in fact, Shakespeare gives several possible motivations for Iago, none of which are quite convincing. Diego has a thing where he’s talking to Emilia about the cheapness of life, and how heroes aren’t what they used to be, but that’s not quite enough to explain it. But I had to leave it unexplained, just in case he turns up again…'
