Fan

Published: 2014
Author: Danny Rhodes

Visceral, upsetting and utterly compelling

I love watching sport. I’m still on a high from the 2012 Olympics and I’m looking forward to this summer’s Commonwealth Games in my home city of Glasgow, I have a space on my mum and dad’s sofa booked for the duration. Yes, I love watching sport. Most sport – there’s one that I can take or leave, preferably leave – and that’s football. I’ve been to more Olympic events in my life than I have been to football matches (Celtic vs Aberdeen, Scotland under15 vs someone or other). So when I received a copy of Fan by Danny Rhodes I was a little bit sceptical. It’s a book about football, what possible interest would it be to me? How foolish I was – yes, there’s football, a lot of football, but this is far from a story about football. This is about futility, depression and the impact of a tragedy on one young man.

In 1989 John Finch, an 18 year-old postman, lives from Saturday to Saturday, following his beloved Nottingham Forest around the country. It’s the time of Thatcherism, the Poll Tax, football hooliganism and tragedy in grounds across Europe. By 2004 Finch is living in London and working as a teacher, he no longer goes to football matches, no longer lives in Nottingham, has no contact with friends from his teenage years and is fighting off the idea of parenthood. The death of his hero Brian Clough and the suicide of an old friend take him back to Nottingham, his youth and Hillsborough on 15th April 1989.

This is an exceptional book which only narrowly misses perfection for me by being a touch too long in the mid-section. Danny Rhodes, who was himself a spectator at Hillsborough on that terrible day, has written a searing and visceral account of what it was like to be a football fan in the 1980s and how the Hillsborough tragedy was almost inevitable in light of previous problems at Leppings Lane and fatal incidents at Bradford, Heysel and Ibrox football grounds and Kings Cross Station. The story takes the reader on an unstoppable journey from one preventable tragedy to the next. It’s distressing to read on, knowing what’s coming next and having the hindsight to know how it could have been prevented but wasn’t. Rhodes’s writing is unstoppable, I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything with such continuous momentum before and it was both compelling and unsettling.

Fan is also one of the most evocative portrayals of depression and PTSD I’ve ever read – as Finch struggles to breath in crowded areas I also felt slightly claustrophobic. It was interesting to read an account of Hillsborough from the perspective of a witness, and a Nottingham Forest fan. Sometimes it’s easy, and understandable, to forget that thousands of people experienced that horrible event. Of course the focus should always be on the 96 who died and their families but it’s important not to ignore the ongoing trauma suffered by those who were also in the stadium that day.

Fan is so much more than a football, or a sports, book. It’s a searingly powerful exploration of raw pain and emotion and one of the most unforgettable books I’ll read this year.