A Season in Sinji

"I think the interesting thing about sport in literature is that nearly all great books about sport aren’t really about sport. This applies to Moneyball – it’s ostensibly about baseball but it’s not really about baseball, it’s about scientific method. It’s the same with A Season in Sinji – it’s a cricket novel, but it’s not about cricket. It’s about life. The form of life it explores is a cricketing life to some degree, or a group of people fighting a war who are seeking solace, or an escape, by playing cricket. So that’s a lesson in itself for a writer. If you want to write really well about sport, then you need to be doing more than just writing about sport. “I think the interesting thing about sport in literature is that nearly all great books about sport aren’t really about sport.” JL Carr knew a huge amount about cricket. Often sports writing in novels strikes the wrong note – it’s not quite convincing and is sort of shoehorned in there for a bit of colour. But in this book it’s excellent. It’s set on a British air force base in West Africa during World War II. It’s hell on earth – it’s terribly hot, the food’s awful, they get ill all the time. They’re bored rigid, and Tom Flanders, who is the central character, sets up a cricket team to keep himself and everyone around him alive and engaged. His biggest worry is how he’s going to retain control of this team and make sure that the toffs – the officer class – won’t co-opt it and wrestle it away from him. It ends up being a struggle between Flanders and his arch enemy the officer Turton, who isn’t much of a cricketer and is generally a poor human being. They get locked into this struggle for this cricket team. So it’s a novel about class, it’s a novel about cricket and it’s a novel about war. It’s also a novel about Englishness. That’s right. The backdrop is how people deal with the underlying uncertainty and fear that goes with warfare. There’s the randomness of whether your number will come up and you will have to fly an air reconnaissance mission. This actually happens at the end of the novel and the mood of those that are picked changes from being bored, restless and ill-tempered to being suddenly focused, fearful and engaged. One of the interesting things is that the pilot chosen on that mission is particularly bad. So you have not only been drawn to do a reconnaissance mission, but you have also been drawn with the worst pilot. So it’s a double stroke of bad luck at the end. Anyone who experienced World War II must have been constantly aware of the power of good luck – where you got sent, whether you survived it, and the brutal probabilities of life as a soldier."