Iron Towns by Anthony Cartwright review – football comes home to the people

This accomplished novel creates a powerful lament for England’s diminished regions

In Anthony Cartwright’s fourth novel, he returns to the sport that animated the widely praised Heartland, and to the Black Country environs he has mapped in all his work. While David Peace bestrides the English football novel, his twin accounts of monomaniacal managerial interiority, The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, planted like the legs of a colossal, bloodied and psychotic goalkeeper, it is easy to forget how others have hymned – and mourned – the game. Nick Hornby’s optimistic memoir Fever Pitch seems a lifetime ago, a relic from the Blairite days when full strips might be worn to No 10. BS Johnson’s book-in-a-box The Unfortunates, both experimental and melancholy – hardly qualities to set the hearts of publishers soaring – and Alan Sillitoe’s short story “The Match” were lifetimes ago.

This is a curious state of affairs, even in these degraded days of Xbox avatars of morally vacant 16-year-olds. Given that the national team has enjoyed a period of managerial calm, overseen by a man who enjoys Updike, Roth and Bellow, and that the Premier League has been won by a real team, the time seems ripe for English football to tell itself different versions of the story. Cartwright’s accomplished novel does just that.

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