HistoryOne of the pleasures of living in the West Village in downtown Manhattan was to go over to Washington Square of a Saturday morning and see New York life already busily underway.
Village life, truly; dog walkers, roller-bladers and, at one corner of the park, a motley collection of men hunched over their chess games and watched, with no less absorption, by a small crowd. And motley they were; young and old, professors and teenagers, and those dreamy, down-at-heel people whom you might call the gifted homeless, or semi- homeless.
Nearby, in the chess cafés of MacDougal Street, smoke hung over yet more intense matches and when I began reading here about Bobby Fischer's emergence in the New York chess community, I wondered how soon a connection would be made to this intense world, and sure enough, here is Fischer, hailed as a teenage prodigy in the Marshall Club in the West Village, and subsequently fawned over as some kind of messiah by rabbinical elders - except he would scorn the parallel, since he was among other unpleasant things, a rabid anti-Semite.
But this is only part of the tale. The authors have tied his story to - oh, metaphors abound - the Cold War and, specifically, one of the most infamous of chess encounters, the 1972 world title clash in Reykjavik between Fischer and the Soviet world champion, Boris Spassky. It was a game which Fischer described, with typical hyperbole, as a contest between "the free world against the lying, cheating, hypocritical Russians . . . a microcosm of the whole world situation. They always suggest that the world leaders should fight it out, hand to hand. And this is what we are doing - not with bombs but battling it out over the board".
The book tells the two players' life stories, their rise as chess prodigies - Fischer at American youth tournaments, Spassky with Communist Party grooming - until their emergence as often unlikely representatives of their respective cultures. It is now only 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and yet how far away it all seems. In some ways, the first World War seems closer, and more comprehensible, than the weird and yet oddly cosy Cold War atmosphere of spies, censorship and people's stadiums. And no more surreal than in the spice it gave the world of sport; consternation as the East Germans win again in the pool, blood-strewn ice hockey games between the US and USSR, and all those strange football fixtures in Eastern Europe, where the home side would get an inexplicable decision from the (ah, strange that) Bulgarian or Hungarian referee. Given such a torrid atmosphere - the Olympics boycotted in 1980, and then again, in retaliation, in 1984 - is it any wonder that Kissinger is on the phone here urging Fischer to stand firm?
Different as the two players were, they were united in what they shared, a single-minded obsession with the game which is truly all-consuming: the endless permutations, the psychological sweep, the almost orgiastic sense of victory and defeat. At its purest, the authors liken it to the most sublime of music or mathematical symmetry, but what it more resembles is the delicious madness of something from Dostoyevsky, or Nabokov's famous chess novel, The Defense, with its portrait of a blocked, driven, almost autistic genius. The authors do, however, somewhat over-egg the eccentricity of it all and the superlatives can become wearying (even the book's title). It is also an account perhaps best appreciated by chess buffs. So that you would need to appreciate, for example, the existential profundity of a rook suddenly sacrificed at move 15.
Nevertheless, it all builds to a satisfying finale at Reykjavik, a city where, appropriately enough, Gorbachev and Reagan later met for a Cold War summit that is now assumed to have been riddled with bugging devices. All kinds of madness broke out before and during the 1972 encounter, but in fairness to the participants they gave a series of games to match the occasion.
The postscript is also interesting; the Soviets bouncing back with new stars such as Karpov and Kasparov, and even beating Korchnoi, the defector "turncoat". Fischer, meanwhile, turns even more eccentric, becoming a Christian cultist and then a recluse, before turning up in rump Yugoslavia in 1992 where, in defiance of UN sanctions, he stages a rematch with Spassky for money, bitterly attacks the west and seems happy to hob-nob with the criminal, xenophobic Serb elements of a once proud communism. Endgame all round.
Eamon Delaney is an author and journalist
Bobby Fischer Goes to War: The True Story of How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time By David Edmonds and John Eidinow Faber and Faber, 276pp. £14.99