by Arunabha Sengupta
This is the best cricket-themed novel I have ever read. Let me rephrase that … or rather paraphrase Shane Warne, “There is Netherland, then there is daylight, then there are other cricket-themed novels.”
Hans van den Broek is a Dutch financial analyst, who migrates from London to New York with his English wife Rachel. After the complications created by the September 11 attacks, which includes giving up their home and moving into Hotel Chelsea, Rachel, a lawyer, moves back to London with their toddler son. The marriage is in doldrums, the relationship long-distant, a fortnightly trans-Atlantic flight the only feeble connection.
To battle the blues, Hans turns to cricket, a strange choice in New York. It is a sport he used to play as a boy in Houdt Braef Standt, The Hague. His new playmates are mainly expats from the Indian subcontinent and West Indians. And thereby he comes across the charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian Indian with fingers in multiple pies and a grand vision of international cricket in New York.
Cricket is woven through the narrative in gentle threads, sometimes etching deceptively sharp patterns. Hans eagerly takes to new customs and mannerisms at the expense of old ones in his new country, but the self-transformation has its limits – in his case in the manner of batting. He would not change his style to loft the ball – never mind the thick grassy outfield which voids traditional options of scoring. ‘It is a fine white thread running, through years and years, to his mothered self.’
There are also some highly technical points about the business of curating a ground – as Chuck lends Hans his car for driving lessons and in return recruits his help to nurture the proposed New York Cricket Club. One particular sequence of paragraphs, when one waits for the severe winter to make way for the green leaves and eventually the next cricket season, is particularly brilliant.
The book is not just about cricket – great books about cricket, very few such have been written, seldom are. There are explorations into human emotions, relationships, the bond between partners, friends, parent and child. There are discussions around 9/11, the Afghan and Iraq Wars and their ripple effect in ordinary lives. Everything is written in lyrical prose, with multiple spiralling switches from past into present into more remote past. The location shifts from London to New York, tarries awhile in the Dutch countryside, sweeps quickly over Trinidad farmlands and even ventures out into the backwaters of Kerala. The tone remains fluid but never compromises on substance.
True, Chuck is linked to the underworld, and he is out to achieve his great American dream. But I think that is where similarities with The Great Gatsby end. Netherland is a very different novel, and, at the risk of flogging a sacred cow, in my opinion the better one. The ending is particularly poignant, with Hans atop the London Eye, thinking about Manhattan as viewed from the Staten Island Ferry.
Perhaps it can be argued that since I am an Indian-born Dutch national who spent a chunk of his life working in the financial domain in New York City and who is also a cricket writer who frequently visits London, this is one book tailor-made for me in a way few books can be expected to. However, I do think that in the current world of global citizenship this is a book that should appeal to one and all.
There are insights into every community that the narrative touches, be it the American equity traders, the Russian immigrant businessmen, the Caribbean diaspora and even the English. One particularly incisive comment on the English arises when Hans, in spite of being extremely well travelled and someone who has lived and worked in New York City, is ‘precluded by nationality from commenting on any place other than Holland’.
This transference-of-parochialism – so inheretly British – sets my mind at peace. This is why 16 years after the publication of this, and several other excellent works, we still find grey-beards in English forums wondering when someone will finally write the ‘great cricket novel’.
After all Joseph O’Neill is Irish, and he writes about a Dutch hero indulging in cricket in New York played by Indian, Pakistani and West Indian immigrants. These are too many stumbling blocks.
We all know it is the exclusive privilege of Anglo-Australian writers to write about cricket in parts of the world that they are not born and stuck in. (Why, it is an English book on cricket which contains a Dutch poem - for crying out loud.)
The zenith will remain anchored to the rather commonplace 1924 novel The Cricket Match by Hugh de Selincourt. Time has not moved for these blokes.
Besides, the posters in Chuck’s office are not of the social-media-taggable English cricketing knights Boycott and Botham, but of the legendary duo Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara. The only English cricketer mentioned in the entire book is Monty Panesar. Blasphemy!
There is no mention of county cricket, village cricket or The Ashes. The one time we read about a televised cricket match Shoaib Akhtar is steaming in to bowl to Stephen Fleming. This novel breaks the basic laws of cricket writing.
Why? There is a vibrant West Indian community in the game, but we don’t have that hackneyed phrase ‘What do they of cricket know… ’ in the book, in the introduction or even as italicised quotation at the beginning or the end. Every cliche is missing.
Reviewers in ancient cricket magazines will probably wonder that since the title is Netherland, why there is no primary source interview with Steven Lubbers, or perhaps Ryan ten Doeschate. Now, about the title: It is alone, lonely while drinking and gambling with a few hedge fund guys in an Arizona casino, after a conference on ‘Oil Consumption: The Shifting Paradigm’, that Hans realises he has hit ocean bottom.
It is a delightful book. Very very highly recommended. For its cricket and literary qualities. Very very few books quality under both categories.