FORETELLING IT LIKE IT IS

Surely, it’s more than coincidence. Two weeks ago, I’m browsing in a second-hand book shop and spy Albion! Albion! by Dick Morland, a Faber and Faber paperback novel, selling for only £1.50p. As for the backcover blurb, I never thought it might be prophetic :

“England in the 1990s : an England in which the partisan and hysterical hooliganism of football supporters has got completely out of control. Parliament has been dissolved, and the country has been divided into four clubs – City, United, Wanderers and Athletic – all violently opposed to one another.”

“It is into this savage world that Whitey Singleton, an expatriate journalist engaged in America in counter-revolutionary propaganda against the regime of the Club Managers, is pitched when his plane is hi-jacked and diverted to London. Singleton is sucked into a nightmare of sinister intrigue which culminates in a rally at Wembley Stadium that turns into a riot of explosive frenzy”.

And then (my italics) : “Originally published in 1974, this prophetic novel anticipated the Brussels riot as well as the Bradford disaster”.

Well perhaps there was bound to be some lone writer who saw it coming but nonetheless, Morland was weirdly prescient. Of course the two classics of the English dystopian novel, Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, did ponder how an elite might use popular culture for political control by manipulating the masses through their most primitive passions. But though Orwell was suspicious of the gladiatorial nature of sport, football in the era of Stanley Matthews and cloth-capped deference was never deemed a subject for art.

Besides both Huxley and Orwell wrote as internationalists when the global atlas was still speckled red and the Brits could let their colonies bother about their national identity. But Albion! Albion! is post-imperialist, linking English nationalism to football hooliganism yet written in the glory days of the early Seventies when the hottest scandals were sideburns and George Best’s truancies.

There’s no preface or biographical information with this 1986 edition. So I know nothing about Dick Morland, the background for his original inspiration or his later views and feelings about how close his prophecy came to reality.

Certainly it’s neither infallible in all its predictions nor perfect in its plotline. Too much double and treble-crossing between the members of its competing factions undermines its narrative and compromises its themes. Besides Albion! Albion! isn’t fully prophetic since racism doesn’t figure among its themes.

But just like the Sex Pistols, Albion! Albion! sings ‘No Future’ alongside ‘God Save The Queen’. That backcover blurb truly is an accurate summary. Football supplies the colours for the bloods of a new violent and squalid tribalism – not so much the opium as the amphetamine of the male masses. It could have been a script for some Arnold Schwarzenegger epic yet it’s set in England not America’s urban badlands and arrived ten years before the Austrian Alp hit his terminating stride.

Besides superior pulp SF is often as likely to hit the corner-flag as the goal. Such contemporary fantasies are usually false Apocalypses; literature acting out fancy-dress nightmares that aren’t expected to escape from dreamland to explode in the waking world. Albion! Albion! is the exception; somehow Morland understood there was a virulent new strain of a virus soon to infect the English male id.

Its politics aren’t strictly accurate and probably shouldn’t be expected to be. Later sociologists of football violence will find few clues here. Albion! Albion! doesn’t mention the new towerblock slums; anticipate the end of the era of full and steady employment; or proclaim the end of the nuclear family and the start of a new generation of one-parent families that might change the socialization of young English males.

And when Morland wrote this book, Margaret Thatcher was just an insignificant Education minister, still squirming under Ted Heath’s thumb. Opportunist media magnates – Australian or otherwise – don’t feature in the story either.

Even so, it’s far-seeing in one respect. Eventually these competing factions of a new English bulldog brutalism get manipulated and muzzled by outside forces as the American ambassador orchestrates a takeover by US troops. Just as in 1995, rabid English nationalism is stupid, self-defeating and a tool of other interests.

Yet even its gaps make its achievement even more special. In the early Seventies, the first violent symptoms of football hooliganism were ignored; everyone was still expecting an evolution to a higher and kindlier state of being. For instance, British prog-rock culture was still suffused by domesticated and totally non-delinquent values. Moral panics concentrated on the apparant threats of sex and drugs, love and peace. Male violence wasn’t a fear. Instead the passivity of suburban dopers was thought most dangerous to the established social order. Only David Bowie sent out a cultural warning and everyone, including himself, thought his Diamond Dogs were an alien American phenomenon.

And yet Albion! Albion! makes the connection. The new tribes of anti-social vandals, the real avenging mob scandalizing the citizenry would-be football supporters not hippies. Furthermore Morland presents the violence as a specifically English disease as America and the rest of Europe look on the brave new regimes of the Club Managers with aghast bewilderment.

As did Irish fans at Lansdowne Road. Of course, we all know not to generalize. We all know that the Irish authorities were far less than competent, that other European countries too have their Fascist fans and that the Lansdowne Road affray was a premeditated riot, planned by an unrepresentative and tight band of neo-Nazi carrion who give all other animals – hyenas have an ecological function; these people don’t - an undeserved bad name.

Albion Albion may be no masterpiece but it reached places most criticallly-approved English novelists still haven’t ventured. But would its author want the latest riots in Dublin to prompt another re-issue. Somehow I suspect he’d be most ambivalent.