The Austrian footballlegend Matthias Sindelar – “The Paper Man” – has been imaginatively reconstructed by Billy O’Callaghan for his third novel. Based on a true story of an interwar romance, the mystery at the heart of this story is an intriguing one – what is the connection between Cork man Jack’s mother, who came to Ireland as a Jewish refugee when the second World War broke out, and Sindelar?
One of the most significant political moments in football history is O’Callaghan’s starting point. In April 1938 the Austrian national team played their last international match, against Germany, until after the second World War as Hitler had just weeks earlier annexed Austria. Sindelar’s actions during the match came with the highest stakes, and yet, O’Callaghan struggles to inject true suspense and jeopardy into this inherently dramatic scene.
The choice to narrate this novel from a loosely omniscient viewpoint was perilous and largely contributes to this lack of narrative tension. There is an awkward slipping in the voice between feigning innocence, clunky melancholy foreshadowing, and occasional prolepsis where the narrator forecasts the future exactly. At the end of the iconic match the narrator suggests, “as the time runs down there’s no sadness, no more sorrow. Tomorrow will bring a fresh tide of that, and all who are here will weigh the joy of now against the falling away of everything that is solid, and some then will weep ...”
The cumulative effect of this inconsistency is unsettling and suggests a crisis of confidence on the part of the author as to how to navigate the time period. This may have been avoided if he had chosen to write from the perspective of one character, expressing their authentic innocence as to the future. The authenticity of the voice is also called into question as the narrator moves between 1930s Vienna and 1980s Cork with little variation of tone.
O’Callaghan’s traditional prose style has garnered him great acclaim to date; his previous novel Life Sentences was shortlisted for the Costa prize and became a best-seller. That was thanks in no small part to the empathetic intuition the author expressed on the page in abundance. The world inhabited in his latest work may have proved unwieldy for the author, but those charmed by his storytelling in past work will nonetheless find more of the same to admire here.
