JL Carr’s 1975 novel about an amateur football team winning the FA Cup might have a Roy of the Rovers plot, but his fantasia on the national game is a rare bulletin from the margins of English life
JL Carr – Joseph Lloyd, but friends knew him as Jim – died in February 1994 at the age of 81. The obituaries were long and appreciative, without ever quite getting beyond the bank of fortifications that the deceased had erected before his highly enigmatic personality and the faint air of concealment that hung over nearly every aspect of his life. This, after all, was a man who, when asked to supply jacket copy for an American edition of one of his novels, vouchsafed the single sentence “JL Carr lives in England”, who left bits of fake medieval statuary lying around rural churchyards “to give people something to think about” and whose funeral was enlivened by the last-minute appearance of a young, beautiful, black-clad woman in high heels whom the other mourners strained to identify. According to his biographer Byron Rogers, who lurked amid the horde of journalists, readers, ex-pupils and the ornaments of advisory committees on church architecture, such had been the rigid compartmentalisation of Carr’s eight decades on the planet that nearly all those present had come to bid farewell to different men.
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