Almanac Book Reviews: ‘The Season’ by Helen Garner – Strange and splendid beauty

The Season by Helen Garner, The Text Publishing Company 2024

Helen Garner has written a nice little book about footy and her grandson Ambrose and herself. And plenty more besides. The Season is the story of the Flemington Colts Under 16s mundane and astonishing 2023 campaign. It’s a tear-pricking, quotidian account of the time Ambrose—star of the tale and one of many in the team—and Garner spent together, recorded before, Garner says, the boy turns into a man and the author dies. There’s a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.

In simple, propulsive sentences, Garner says nothing that doesn’t ring true, to this coach of young players at least. The mystery and magnificence of footy in all its

ugly brutality but also strange and splendid beauty.

The awkward and graceful ways of boys and men, their drive to violence and their tenderness, their nurturing and destructiveness, service and selfishness. Their delicacy, their fragility,

what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world.

And the liminal, things on the cusp, the crossing-over from adolescence to adulthood, from old age to…oblivion?

Well, almost everything rings true. The Season is preoccupied by tackling, its technique and its literal in-your-face aggression, signifying conquest and submission perhaps and footy’s ever-looming threat of danger and injury. Amby says it feels

soooooo good to tackle someone; it’s basically inflicting physical harm but with no actual hard feelings.

Tackling’s one thing, his wise and loving father says, but you have to get to a point

where you learn to love being tackled.

Older brother declares

tackling is the most cathartic part of the whole game. Much better than kicking goals

.

Really? Better to be Tony Liberatore than Peter Daicos? Still, the emphasis on tackling’s supposed prominence in footy psychology is but a small wrinkle in a whole tapestry; a quibble that just as likely reflects your reviewer’s schooling in Melbourne’s amateur’s league where the suburbs were mostly ‘leafy’ and the style of play famously ‘open’.

Garner is also preoccupied with the maturing,

no longer slender

bodies of the young Colts. She admires their growing bulk and power, but sees loss too:

their fineness seems valuable, precious, so soon to be swallowed up in manliness.

The boys are obsessed with their rigs too, with their new beauty (their vanity is revealed but in a sort of laughing delight, never scorn. Mullets get a big run in this book.) and their injuries, their wounds that smack of honour.

Injury and pain are integral to footy and this undercurrent runs through The Season—parents and grandparents’ dread, young players steeling themselves, exhortations to go hard lest you get hurt. Then there’s the violence, latent and real. Footy as an outlet for aggression, for young players and their grandmothers alike. Keeping control when the red mist descends, or losing it. Dealing with on-field thugs and thugs that come from behind the boundary fence. Understanding and punishing your own and your teammates’ acts of thuggery. Admiring Toby Greene the player but never forgetting let alone forgiving his hits on Marcus Bontempelli and Luke Dahlhaus (Garner is an ardent Doggy who admits to a less-than-full knowledge of the rules of footy but like all good barrackers is a good hater, too)

It takes a village to raise a child or maybe just a footy team? Garner’s account is full of surprisingly moving examples of actual and locum parents dealing with the joys, challenges and setbacks that footy and life always throw up. Coaches who teach skills for the game and beyond and resist old-school temptations to rule by fear and shame. Families and footy clubs whose first instinct is to praise their youngsters, not get stuck into them. A father who knows when his kid should bow to the discipline of the team; another father working with

patient devotion to feed a family.

A grandmother who wants to know her grandson better

before it’s too late, to learn what’s in his head, what drives him; to see what he’s like when he’s out in the world.

The Season is packed full with startling observations about those around her but Garner is at her most acute writing about herself. She’s a doting grandmother, the family drudge, a hanger on at the periphery, a trespasser on men’s territory, and an ambitious writer. And a remarkably severe (grandiose?) self-critic. After a trifling fight with Amby (the actual teenager) she flagellates herself:

I am once again, what I have always been, a very small piece of shit, and furthermore, now, an old one, lonely, sad, ugly, garrulous, a nuisance, a bore.

Ouch.

That might be so, but she’s also an idiosyncratic observer and interpreter of footy and maybe even men. She says that footy is

a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry. It revives us. It sustains us.

How true. She also says that footy gives glimpses of what is

grand and noble, and admirable and graceful about men.

Here’s hoping.