I never thought my footy pre-season would include Helen Garner… but then came her glorious memoir, The Season.

But this is not an ordinary book about football. As Garner explained –

Blokes I know get excited when I tell them I’m trying to write about footy … I think they’re imagining the books they would write. Their books would be full of facts and stats and names and memories. They have been formed by footy. I can’t do it their way. I don’t know how. I get panicky. The only thing I can think of to say is, ‘It’ll be a nanna’s book about footy.’ Short silences fall.

And it is a ‘nanna’s book’ because it’s the story of Garner, her grandson and his suburban football team.

…I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.

There’s nothing to say about Garner’s superb writing that hasn’t already been said one million times, but I can tell you what I particularly loved about this book.

Firstly, it’s a beautiful record of her relationship with her grandson, Amby.

All my life I’ve fought men, lived under their regimes, been limited and frustrated by their power; but in the first decade of the century I became a grandmother to a girl and two boys … having never raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and subliminate their drive to violence.

Secondly, (and as always with Garner), her keen eye for detail. She has a knack for making even the most ordinary thing vivid.

His teammates…form two circles and start a manic handball drill, shouting each other’s names in triplets, in nasal, broken voices: ‘TommyTommyTommy. NedNedNed. XavierXavierXavier.’

Thirdly, she draws parallels between football and the bigger stuff in life. In Garner’s skilled hands, this works (I reckon anyone else would have botched it, particularly if someone associated with football had attempted the same).

The pandemic came. Melbourne copped more lockdowns than any other city in the nation. That’s when footy really got a grip on me. It made me feel lucky to be alive. I learnt that when the chips are down, football rises. I saw that it’s a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before citizenry. It revives us. It sustains us. In a time of fear and ignorance, it holds us above the abyss. And I started to glimpse what is grand and noble, and admirable and graceful about men.

And lastly, I just loved it because I’ve been a footy mum for years, and the things that Garner did and saw are wholly relatable.

Oh it’s hopeless, and I can’t pretend that my eye is not always seeking out Amby. I try to force myself to survey the game in a detached spirit, but I know the shape of his shoulders, the angle of his run, and there he goes, breaking out of a pack…

Who should read The Season? Footy fans will enjoy it but really, it’s much more than a football book. It’s off-ground drama, its Wagner’s Ring cycle, it’s love and attention that is particular to grandparents.

4/5

Out we go, picking our way across the soaked and trampled grass. We are very small and shy and thrilled, holding out our offering, the big square plastic box of orange wedges and a brown paper bag for the skins. The mud-streaked, panting boys jostle around us, tower over us, grabbing the fruit in their fists and to my amazement politely saying thank you! Smiling at us! Up close, oh, their soft faces and special haircuts, their pimples, their nascent moustaches. We love them.