Book review: Joseph O’Neill’s second novel starts off mid-stream in the cool, collected environment of a technical writing collective in Pittsburgh, where Lakesha Williams diagnoses her colleague Mark Wolfe as suffering “a crisis of dignity”. A pointless scuffle with a receptionist and a high-and-mighty email to a client prompt Lakesha’s suggestion that Mark take a couple of weeks’ leave to clear his head and level out. He surprises her by agreeing – unknown to Lakesha, a cryptic email from his mother has prompted Mark to visit his brother Geoff in the UK, a football agent, to recruit an African teen prodigy called Godwin to the European big leagues.
Things go wrong quickly for Mark, and the worse they go the better for us as readers because, when not knocked off-balance and forced to improvise, he’s insufferable: an expert in his narrow professional field but a profound egotist and overthinker who never quite got over the collective delusions of grandeur cultivated at university. He’s openly disdainful of Geoff, who he correctly reads as an incompetent chancer. But he is almost instantly embroiled anyway through a simple appeal to his sense of superiority, carrying him past any number of warning signs and the limits of his own competence.
Running in parallel with Mark’s misadventures are Lakesha’s workplace struggles in his absence. A hardworking administrator and level-headed observer of the people around her, she’s challenged to deal first with Mark’s mystifying behaviour and then with an unfolding insurgency within the supposedly non-hierarchical politics of the agency.
Lakesha isn’t quite a purely female counterpart to Mark – she’s too likeable, for a start – but she shares his ambition and determination not to be bested, and is ultimately open to some of his ambitions as well.
The linchpin of all this is Godwin, less a person than an abstract holy grail around which the main players’ various self-serving, extractive fantasies revolve (the term “black pearl” recurs throughout the book). Glimpsed through unverified video clips, Godwin’s image has sufficient magnetism to keep an intercontinental farce in motion, embroiling not only Mark and Geoff but their distant, scheming mother, veteran football scout and stereotypical Frenchman Jean-Luc Lefebvre, and others besides.
The stage seems set for Mark to be truly dragged through the thistles across multiple continents, but after some entertaining early double-crosses, the endgame mostly happens at second hand, including through the reflections of Jean-Luc, who earlier deploys most of the exposition that O’Neill uses to bring the world of football scouting to semi-realistic life.
Something clever could be said here about depicting postcolonial value extraction at a remove, but as clever as that might sound in the abstract, it’s hard to get away from the lack of satisfaction on the page.
That sense of having had the rug pulled dominates when considering Godwin as a whole. On one hand, there’s the elegance of O’Neill’s prose, some inspired moments of humour and a premise that’s rich in uncomfortable parallels. On the other, there’s a central plot line that starts off with energy – well-attuned to a profoundly unlikeable central character – but becomes a remotely witnessed slog, heavy on after-the-fact exposition and undermining any real investment in most of the characters.
Lakesha remains more sympathetic but even her story seems undermined by the calculated irony of Godwin’s final twists. The overall experience baffles and frustrates more than it engages the brain or heart. Despite the skill on show, this is a journey that is all too easy to walk away from.
Godwin by Joseph O’Neill (Fourth Estate, $34.99) is out now.
