John’s King’s The Football Factory was a novel for people who thought reading might not be for them, the power of those first discomforting pages as transportive as waking up in the Gulag with Solzhenitsyn or thumbing a lift with Kerouac. Beginning in the mind of a character literary fiction had taken care to avoid, the novel explored a sensibility that had traditionally been the province of pulp, its portraits as fully realised those found in McEwan or Barnes, but with none of that pair’s decorative courtesy or insistence that lead personae ought to be middle-class professionals. If King’s writing was too accomplished to be dismissed as salacious, the book’s fierceness was too true to itself to entice a literary community weaned on violence as metaphor, and the novel’s indifferent critical reception stood in marked contrast to the word of mouth excitement it generated.
For this reader King’s dark psycho-realist stream of consciousness was as vivid as lived experience, raw but controlled, his menacing prose the print equivalent of finding yourself on the menu instead of the food you thought you had ordered. Since that landmark King has authored nine other novels and numerous short stories, many of which revel in his love of music (he hosts the Human Punk club night), and now a third novella, Peekaboo Bosh, in which cruelty to animals is traced back to our indifference to one another.
In person King is a mixture of the matter of fact and zen, a principled pragmatist (“I’ll work with anyone except cunts”) whose friendly curiosity does not extend to the sufferance of fools. As a seasoned writer he takes as great a care to listen as to pass judgement, the pub we meet at a “people’s parliament” that is consistent with his belief in a “relaxed form of socialism” that this country is temperamentally suited to.
From the first page of The Football Factory, where terrified Coventry City fans are portrayed as sheep to slaughter, to Peekaboo Bosh’s surreal assault on an animal testing centre, an awareness of interspecies cruelty runs deep throughout King’s work; and it’s a long time since he stopped eating animals: “I was 22 and locked up in a Greek prison. I was sitting in the yard feeling sorry for myself. I had this bowl of the thinnest stew you can imagine, but there was a lump of meat in there and when I looked more closely at this I saw a thick rubber vein sticking out of it, and there was stubble as well, as if someone had been shaved, which I suppose the animal had been. It was then I promised I would stop eating meat when I was released, so this would have been 1983, and I gave up dairy ten years later. My novel The Prison House draws on this period, and laid the foundations for Slaughterhouse Prayer, where I felt as if I had got to where I wanted to be as a writer.”
Bullying and sadism are King’s themes, but also their corollary, decency and tolerance, oft-professed British virtues, which he tends to frame in moral rather than political terms: “I don’t think I am a moralist, as such, but I do have morals. I’m not competitive, I have little time for pecking orders, and I don’t understand the need to bully and abuse. It is there at every level of society. It bothers me. With White Trash and now Peekaboo Bosh I have created individuals who personify that bullying, people with power over others, the sort who enjoy causing mental and physical pain. They pick on those who can’t defend themselves. I suppose I am boring, but I believe in democracy, in finding a consensus, some sort of balance talked through in a proper pub. For me that is a massive part of being English / British. There are hypocrisies and failures, I know, but that is true of any culture, and I do believe there is a basic decency here. We know what is right and wrong, even if we don’t always do the right thing. You can call me a patriot, a localist, a Wessex Man, call me anything you like. I don’t mind!”
As in war films which espouse a pacifist message yet portray combat as exciting, King deliberately walks the line between celebration and critique of the culture he portrays. “That’s essential. To show both sides of the equation, the thrill humans get from conflict, also the creation of enemies and how that makes us feel good about ourselves. George Orwell knew. I look at stereotypes, point out hypocrisies. The Football Factory trilogy is rooted in Orwell’s ‘power of the proles’, the failure of political parties, the way working-class males feel they are treated like scum by those in power. Not much has changed thirty years on.”
While being white, male and in their sixties has not harmed the media profile of a Piers Morgan or Jordan Peterson, King does not believe the same is true for working class writers in the same demographic: “We speak two languages in this country – the language of the wealthy and formally ‘educated’, and the language of the common people, the ‘plebs’.” There are few places he thinks this is more pronounced than in his own world of writing and publishing: “When it comes to publishing, there is a belief that only certain part of society are intelligent enough to read books. It is a snobbery that holds back so many people who want to write or put out books. Some are allowed through the gates, but they are small in number and must behave, write and think to order, change their personalities even.”
King offers the experience of the original angry young man, his friend Alan Sillitoe: “I suggested to Alan that it must have been harder for him as a working-class man from Nottingham to get published at the end of the 1950s, but he said no, it was easier than today (speaking in the early 2000s). And I would say it was easier when I was first published in the late 1990s. There were these gentleman publishers in Alan’s day who truly believed in literature, and they were excited to publish working-class voices. That had changed in the early 2000s, but look at the state of things today. It is shocking. Alan hated the label ‘working-class writer’, because isn’t it a way of sticking someone in a box, treating them as a novelty act, asking for the same handful of stories repeated over and over again forever? When certain authors came through in the late-1990s there was a lot of talk about how this idea was being disproved, but it wasn’t in the establishment’s heart, it was a phase. People want to read books that reflect their lives and feelings, but too often those putting them out have little or no connection to their worlds.”
I ask King whether this is part of the reason he decided to form his own publishing company, London Books, with his friend Martin Knight. He says, “I was walking through Soho drunk one night, and there was this late-night bookshop above a basement sex shop, where you had pissed book-lovers upstairs, and another sort of punter downstairs. I saw a copy of Night And The City by Gerald Kersh, read a few pages and was hooked. I tried to get a couple of publishers interested in republishing the book, but had no joy, so London Books was born. I like putting books together, understand the process and believe I am a decent editor. It can be a distraction, but it is a good feeling bringing these special books back to life, and publishing new fiction, which we also do.” He does not, however, have any illusions that he is leading a publishing revolution, “We are limited, as the big publishers control distribution and can sell a lot more.” He also does not believe the industry is likely to self correct anytime soon, “Too many imprints have become soulless machines, their fiction increasingly conformist. They pump out propaganda claiming to be ‘diverse’ and ‘progressive’ when they are anything but.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a “football” writer who never wrote much about the game itself, King laughs off having any investment in England winning the world cup later this year. Would it mean as much to him to win now as it would in the past? “I have never minded that much! There has always been a chaos about English football, the excitement of the leagues verses the failures of the national side. The best time for England to have won a trophy would have been the Euros in 1996, that 4-1 win against Holland was special. Or when we had four Chelsea players in the side, but to be honest I have never really understood the hysteria that follows us being kicked out of another tournament.” So it was never just been about football for him? “Never for me. We are talking about twenty-two people kicking a round object up and down a patch of grass! That was fine when we were kids, but for my generation football was about being with friends, the youth cultures of the day, the drinking and pubs and music and days spent travelling up and down the country. There was a danger which was exciting and made it different to other sports. Whereas now, football is just one more commodity controlled by big business.”
Peekaboo Bosh is for sale on John’s website, signed and dedicated copies available on request
