‘The ball is round’, so the well-worn saying goes, ‘and the game lasts ninety minutes.’ Joseph O’Neill’s latest novel, Godwin, is ostensibly about football, but as he illustrates through the story, football isn’t even about football any more. It’s about labour and energy and capital flows across continents. It’s about resource extraction, commodity trading, human farming and medical experimentation. Just as O’Neill used cricket in Netherland (2008) to anatomise post-9/11 New York, here he looks at the beautiful game and finds all the world’s horrors. 

But not immediately. Godwin opens in Pittsburgh, with our first narrator, Lakesha Williams, co-lead of ‘the Group’, a horizontalist freelancers’ cooperative. Mark Wolfe, a misanthropic technical writer soon to become our second narrator, is in the process of being reprimanded for a sad scuffle with a receptionist. Williams, a preppy, therapised human resources type, is attempting to mediate in a way that aligns with the cooperative’s principles, which are modelled on those of the Rochdale Society. After running through various bureaucratic processes to determine how precisely the squabble might be equitably resolved, Williams grants Wolfe a fortnight’s paid leave. All the while, she ruminates over the less committed Group members, handling their cleaning duties and generally picking up the slack. 

If you’re wondering when things will move on to football, then you’ve hit upon the first challenge of this book. O’Neill tells his stories at one remove throughout Godwin – sometimes effectively, sometimes exhaustingly. Nearly everything is explained through outsiders’ eyes. We get to Mark through Lakesha’s account of