Saturday 20th July 2019
Kick Off: 11.00am BST
Hongkou Stadium
Capacity: 33.060
Opened: March 1999
Previous Match: West Ham United 1 - 4 Manchester City
Steve Bruce - Football Manager, Author and man who looks like he is impersonating his own Nan.
In what appears to have been an ambitiously short space of time between 1999 and 2000, the literary titan wrote three thrilling novels, and published them just as briskly. We’re not sure why he did this, but we do know that he gets a bit sheepish when it’s brought up in interviews, and the exact details of the arrangement he had with Paragon Press Publishing are far from common knowledge. There are even rumours he didn’t actually write the books himself, but I refuse to believe such hearsay.
Anyway, after some gnashing and wailing following the sequel’s meteoric surge in price, (from £70 to over £250) a mysterious fellow Bruce fan sent me the second novel, Sweeper, in exchange for my copy of the first. The result is the review that lies before you. Sit back, unwind, and let me escort you through Bruce’s second volume, a warren of intrigue featuring Yugoslavian warlords, lesbian prostitutes, Nazi-hunting spies and much, much more besides…
The first thing you need to know about Bruce’s novels is that each balances its bone-warpingly tedious mystery plot on a flimsy scaffold of footballing truisms and trite ruminations on modern life. The star of the series is Steve Barnes, football manager and occasional amateur murder detective.
Not everyone has “a good GCSE in English” like Bruce, so you may not twig that this Barnes fellow is actually an ingeniously devised author surrogate for the man himself. This is just one of many high-concept literary devices used throughout the text, like random commas and names that change spelling from time to time.
Another is Bruce’s construction of his own maddeningly specific network of fictional clubs. It’s called the Bruniverse (by me) and it’s a world very much like our own, excepting his decision to mangle the names of those clubs with which he has been connected, as well as an increasingly large, seemingly randomly smattering of others. It’s like a pound-shop Westeros, only made up entirely of places you imagine voted for Brexit despite being largely dependent on EU funding.
https://thesetpieces.com/features/sweep ... ce-review/
