Football Factory

By John King

Book Overview

The Football Factory is driven by its two main characters--late-twenties warehouseman Tommy Johnson and retired ex-soldier Bill Farrell. Tommy is angry at his situation in life and those running the country. Outside of work, he is a lively, outspoken character, living for his time with a gang of football hooligans, the excitement of their fights and the comradeship he finds with his friends. He is a violent man, at the same time moral and intelligent.

Bill, meanwhile, is a former Second World War hero who helped liberate a concentration camp and married a survivor. He is a strong, principled character who sees the self-serving political and media classes for what they are. Tommy and Bill have shared feelings, but express their views in different ways. Born at another time, they could have been the other. As the book unfolds both come to their own crossroads and have important decisions to make.

The Football Factory is a book about modern-day pariahs, people reduced to the level of statistics by years of hypocritical, self-serving party politics. It is about the insulted, marginalised, unseen. Graphic and disturbing, at times very funny, The Football Factory is a rush of literary adrenalin.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1629631167
• ISBN13: 9781629631165
• Release Date: December 2015
• Publisher: PM Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

F***ing brilliant

The film is even better, in the words of my younger brother..."You will want to put on your Stone Island jumper and kick the f**k out of somebody"buy it ;)

Brilliant and Disturbing

Brilliant and disturbing depiction of a contemporary working-class Londoner. The novel portrays a bleak England which has little to offer its poor, white natives. The central character-who one imagines must be loosely based on the author-is a nasty man, whose one outlet is football hooliganism. A Chelsea fan, he defines his existence not around actual matches and scores so much as around prospective and actual pre and post-match violence. The book seems to suggest that for him, and his ilk, society has nothing to offer and he must retreat to the camaraderie of his fighting friends to find any release and meaning in his existence. The chapters alternate between focusing on the main character on match days, and peripheral characters (some only barely related to the novel at all) and slices of London life. Despite the very raw descriptions of violence and sex, the writing is too deft, and the message too sharp for the book to be considered a mere cult novel. King's subsequent novels, Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, and White Trash are all equally vital-if not as raw-reading. Great non-fiction companions to this book are Colin Ward's classic of football hooligans, Steaming In, and Nick Danziger's depressing travelogue of England, Danziger's Britain.