Joseph O’Neill broke out with his third novel, Netherland, which made the Booker longlist in 2008 and was ecstatically reviewed in the New Yorker by James Wood, whose praise made it that summer’s hot book, propelling him into the literary A-list. But come autumn, O’Neill was the fall guy in Zadie Smith’s influential essay Two Paths for the Novel, which contrasted the smoothness of his post-9/11 scenario (“perfectly done … that’s the problem”) with the edgier experiment of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, branding Netherland an antiquated example of “a breed of lyrical realism [that] has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked”.
Although his next novel, The Dog (2014), about a New York attorney in Dubai, widely seen as a Netherland minus, was also Booker longlisted, O’Neill seemed to recede from view almost as suddenly as he’d emerged. So much the better, perhaps: his exceptional new novel, Godwin, coming 10 years after his last, would seem to represent time well spent. It somehow wrings edge-of-your-seat drama from the unlikely subject of the murky office politics dividing a technical writers’ co-op in pre-Trump Pittsburgh – and as if that doesn’t sound improbable enough, O’Neill splices that story with an equally unlikely saga involving a transcontinental hunt to snap up a gifted young footballer in west Africa.
The chase kicks off when Mark Wolfe, a thirtysomething failed scientist now writing grants for big pharma, is contacted from London by his estranged half-French half-brother, Geoff, breathlessly explaining that, in a bid to set up as a football agent in London, he’s paid $5,000 to an Ivorian middleman for three months’ “exclusive access” to footage of a young player known as Godwin. “I’m not saying he’s as good as Messi. I’d never say that. But he’s like him,” says Geoff, pleading for Mark to help him find the boy. “You’re the cleverest person I know … If you can’t find him, no one can.”
