Book 1 - The Grass Arena by John Healy
Reading date - March 2020
Anyway, they told me this was the best book they had ever read and me being easily led, decided I would buy it for myself. I wanted the first edition because, why not? I headed off to eBay, where I buy a lot of my books from and I found it for about £3. eBay is great for old books, or any books for that matter. You get to support a small business (for the most part), recycle and you save some pennies.
The book arrives and I set to reading it, going on the glowing reference it got and despite the fact I had other books before it.
The book is an autobiography. It tells the story of John Healy growing up in inner London in around the 1940s and 50s. His dad was handy with his fists but also very religious. I always question how you can be both but hey, a lot of people were..and still are.
Having had the shit kicked out of him by boys at school, John gets sent ‘back home’ to Ireland and develops a taste for the drink. He comes back to London and finds himself homeless. He becomes an alcoholic and patrols grass arenas and squats finding somewhere to sleep every night.
He inevitably ends up doing time and during one of his stretches, he meets what I think now is a prison social worker who helps him transform his life. He learns to play chess and ends up travelling the world entering (and winning) chess tournaments.
To me, this book wasn’t as amazing as it was made out to be..but then maybe the journo has never read one of my favourite books (The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists). Part of this book could have been made shorter and parts of it could have been made longer. Once you’ve read about soggy boots once, you don’t need to read about them a million times..but maybe it was repeated so the situation really hit home.
On the whole, it was worth the read and I’m glad I read it but towards the end I was checking how many pages were left..
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