A one-of-a-kind book by a one-of-a-kind writer
Godwin (4th Estate) by Joseph O’Neill
Joseph O’Neill remains best known for Netherland (2008). Hailed as a Great American Novel, this story of New York’s thriving immigrant cricket community drew comparisons with John Updike, Don DeLillo and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His last two books did not achieve the same heights of acclaim – but Godwin, being also about sport, actively invites comparison to the book that made his name.
At the centre of the novel is Mark Wolfe, a thirty-something technical writer living in Pittsburgh. When we meet him in January 2015, he is depressed by “modern stupidity” and “fantasizing about the time … when our kind no longer roams Earth”. Then his half-brother Geoff gets in touch. Geoff is a soccer agent who, having seen a video of an African boy called Godwin, is convinced he’s found the next Messi. Only, he doesn’t know where in Africa the footage was taken. And, conveniently for the plot, he’s broken his leg. He wonders if Mark might investigate.
The implausibility of Mark accepting the assignment is more than excused by the mad brilliance of what follows. Dispatched to France, he is tasked with getting the footage verified by another agent, who refuses to help. Mark undertakes to locate Godwin himself, which, after a sleepless, caffeinated night on Google Maps, he does – to Benin in West Africa. Exhilarated by his discovery, he reconnects with the agent to ask if he’ll join the expedition. The agent then steals Mark’s money and goes to Benin alone. Mark is shaken and ashamed.
He returns to Pittsburgh a changed man. Where before he “didn’t have his heart in his work”, now he wants “to grab hold of ordinary life like a normal human being” and “make a greater contribution”. To this end he stands for a senior role in the co-operative he works for, miraculously winning the election. But no one has confidence in him, and very soon the co-operative’s African-American founder Lakesha, to whose perspective the novel now shifts, has an insurrection on her hands.
The parallels with the work of another Joseph – Conrad – are clear throughout. There is the French agent’s description of Godwin as a “Black Diamond”, language that could have come straight out of Heart of Darkness. There is his notion that African soccer players are more authentic than white ones, little different from the idea of the noble savage. And then there is the men’s belief in their own nobility, their conviction that they’re doing Godwin, and later Lakesha, a good turn by involving themselves. The colonial instinct dies hard in the west.
The Conrad influence is also felt in Godwin’s architecture. Most novelists, when they switch perspective, do so to advance the plot. But O’Neill, like Conrad in Victory, lets his voices overlap, so that we experience certain sequences from multiple angles. It is an ingenious way of increasing our sympathy, as characters bravely respond on the outside to events that we have seen cause them pain on the inside.
As for the voices themselves, Mark’s will be familiar to readers of O’Neill’s other novels. Prolix, nerdy and digressive, he is a man who can leave no avenue of thought unexplored, expounding on everything from the “exquisite pleasure to be had in drafting a good invoice” to “J.R.R. Tolkien’s concocted land of Mordor”. The Lakesha sections are better behaved; like their narrator, their prose is unfussy and to the point.
This does not make for the most coherent reading experience, especially when the novel is asked to awkwardly accommodate a third voice: the French agent, returned from Africa. But it doesn’t matter. On a sentence level, O’Neill is unequalled among contemporary novelists. And few are more thoughtful about the legacies of colonialism. Godwin is a one-of-a-kind book by a one-of-a-kind writer.
This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.
