A Season With Verona

Tim Parks

Well, I liked this book a great deal but it was never going to be otherwise. Parks is an author I always enjoy and his theme in this book is, as always, Italy (and more specifically, Verona, in the part of Italy I know and love best). And it's a football book, hurrah. And best of all it was a free hardback (thanks, BBC). It came out only this month and I can't remember the last time I had a book quite so fresh off the printing presses.

Look out for a brilliant first chapter spent on the 13 hour bus journey to Bari for the first away trip of the season. Parks travels with the hardcore Hellas Verona supporters. It occurred to me that what makes Parks such a good writer in these circumstances is that he is used to being an outsider looking in, watching, analysing. Except in this case it isn't his Englishness which makes him different, it's his age, his class and his quiet demeanour. On the bus he carries bottled water and tissues while the rest of the crew get drunk and do drugs. Later in the journey he offers his tissues to his fellow tifosi (he prefers the dialect "butei") to use when they need toilet paper. He is accepted into the group and nicknamed "il parroco" (the priest).

Funnily enough, I did set out determined to mark Parks down on two counts, but in the end I let him off. My first problem with the project was that it seemed bit too easy, a bit too obvious. You're an established writer and you've churned out several books about Italy and you're hunting around for a new theme. Football writing has been fashionable for a decade, all you've got to do is go to a few matches and toss off a few thousand words a week. Plus you get to say to your wife every weekend that you can't fix that bit of guttering, you have to go to the stadium, after all you've got a _book_ to write. Worst of all, I was thinking, Nick Hornby has already done the definitive football book (Fever Pitch) and Joe McGinniss has already done the definitive Italian football book (The Miracle of Castel di Sangro). But Parks won me over and I decided there was room for his book too. Hornby's book is about himself, McGinniss's is about the club and its players but Parks writes about the fans, the Verona fans.

The second problem I thought I was going to have with the book is called Chievo. They're the city of Verona's tiny second club, the team who have come from nowhere and joined Hellas Verona in Serie A. Before starting the book I was wondering how Parks was going to get round the problem that he'd actually picked the dull, established Hellas team to write about instead of the Cinderella team of Chievo from across town. Actually he solves the problem neatly - part of the dramatic tension late in the book (and in the season) arises from the near panic that spreads in the Hellas camp when they realise they risk relegation in-the-same-season as Chievo come up. It's a terrifying and humiliating prospect for the Hellas fans like Parks. It's a nice bit of partisan writing.

In the end the only problem I had with the book was the slightly self-serving analysis Parks serves up to explain and excuse the thuggish and racist behaviour of his fellow Verona fans. On the surface he has a problem - if he blandly condemns the Verona fans then all he's got is a pious book and that's clearly not what he wanted to write (and anyway he's part of Verona's fan base). If he condones it then he's merely writing a racist apologia. Parks finds a middle way. According to him the chants, the violence and vulgarity in the stadium is boastful, empty, self-mocking, knowing and ironic - all part of the theatrical streak in Italian society. Maybe he's right, but it's a rather convenient verdict.

Still, it's a worthwhile book for anyone interested in Italy and a must-read for fans of Serie A. I rattled through it.