Not since Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain has there been a better portrayal of a conflicted male sexuality. Raisin adumbrates Tom’s sexual awakening as sensitively as Alan Hollinghurst, as lubriciously as Edmund White. When his desires settle on Town’s head groundsman, Liam, it’s a passion that threatens to ruin his career. It’s no surprise, then, to learn Tom is gay, though in deep denial. He panegyrises the men’s “gym lines”, their “machine hardness”. Tom’s observations of his fellow players are sexualised innocuously at first, then with frustrated fervour: “his shirt clung damply to him, glued to his vertebrae”. Raisin’s speciality is the lone, peripheral, terminally awkward male (the psychotic Sam Marsdyke from his debut novel, God’s Own Country the widower shipbuilder Mick in Waterline), but from early on it is clear something else is in play. Tom is an introvert and a loner, and much is made of his “separateness from the other players”. He shrinks from his father’s friends, and “the unspoken pity behind their words at his failure to gain a contract”. This defining disaster has Tom lamenting his outcast state: “He had been the best player at his own school, a striker too,” but finds himself “placed on the wing” by tyrannical manager Clarke. The novel is the story of Tom Pearman, a promising 19-year-old striker from the north of England who ends up on the substitutes’ bench of a League Two southern club (referred to simply as “Town”) after his boyhood Premier League academy lets him go. Also, it’s about the love that still dare not speak its name. It’s about ambition, friendship, rivalry, talent, and how early potential always meets the implacable wall of adult reality. And, as with most sports novels, it’s not really about sport. Luckily, Ross Raisin’s exceptional new novel addresses and overturns these preconceptions and conventional notions of masculinity in the most unexpected and sophisticated fashion.
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