King, John 1960-

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KING, John 1960-

PERSONAL:

Born 1960.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA, England.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

The Football Factory, Vintage (London, England), 1997.

The Headhunters, Vintage (London, England), 1998.

England Away, Vintage (London, England), 1999.

Human Punk, Vintage (London, England), 2001.

White Trash, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2001.

The Prison House, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2004.

ADAPTATIONS:

The Football Factory was adapted for a feature film, 2003, by Vertigo Films, directed by Nick Love.

SIDELIGHTS:

British author John King looks at the seamier, violent side of urban and suburban life in contemporary England. In The Football Factory and England Away, he examines the violent psyche of the football (or soccer) hooligan; in Human Punk he puts a lens to the Punk rock movement; and in White Trash the class war is on display. King's books blend street slang reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, violence, and social commentary.

Tom Johnson is nearing thirty in The Football Factory. A supporter of the Chelsea club, he hates anyone who isn't for his team and he lives for the post-match fights at the side of his fellow Chelsea rowdies. A warehouse packer, Johnson narrates this largely plotless novel that is also at times told from the points of view of a journalist and an old soldier. A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found this a "relentlessly ugly catalogue" of fights and drinking. In King's novel, the football gang becomes a home for Johnson and young men like him, and according to the same reviewer, the book relies on the "authenticity" of King's voice.

Such authenticity was not apparent for all reviewers. Writing for TAS Book Review, Dominick Weir, for example, noted that the protagonist of The Football Factory "could be any yob anywhere. He's talking hard, saying nothing. He's not invested with charm, or wit or even the ability to be compelling while shocking." Chris Nelson, on the other hand, felt in his Calgary Sun Online review that "King gets it right … and it will be a shocking read for many." For Nelson, the emphasis on the feeling of family which such hooligan gangs provides is a central part of the story. The book is, according to Nelson, "a bitter but beautiful portrait of those people," as well as a "savage but satisfying read." Similarly, Merritt Moseley, writing in the Sewanee Review, found a "disgusting vigor" in the novel, and Theo Tait, writing in the Times Literary Supplement thought this best-seller provided a "terrifying insider's view of a dedicated and semi-organized Chelsea fighting firm, rendered in savage, visceral prose."

King followed the fortunes of Chelsea and many of the customers of a West London pub through two more loosely connected novels, Headhunters and England Away. In the latter novel, King presents a group of football fans as they wreak havoc in Europe on their way to an England-versus-Germany match. King also intersperses World War II memories from an old man into the narrative. Tait was less impressed with this effort from King, calling it an "often flabby and under-edited novel," and complaining that the author mistakes authenticity for "brutality, misogyny and bodily fluids." According to Tait, "There is little to redeem this glib foray into hooligan chic."

The New Statesman's Toby Mundy observed that many reviewers wrote about King's first three novels "as if they were works of anthropology." Mundy further noted, "It is true that they give voice to a type of working-class masculinity that is rarely heard in literary novels." Such was not the case, according to Mundy, with King's fourth novel, Human Punk. "This novel is compelling," Mundy wrote, "not as a study of working-class blokes, but as a highly mannered work of fiction." The book follows the life of Joe Martin, a working-class youth, from the 1970s to the end of the century, examining how violence shapes his life. A fan of punk bands from the Sex Pistols to the Clash, Joe is part of a gang of punks that battles other gangs; one day he is thrown into a canal in an attack that goes beyond the usual bounds of such violence. This attack stays with him through the following years; even as he escapes the narrow world of Slough, where he grew up, he cannot escape this early violence. He travels the world and when he returns to Slough two decades later, he is a punk rock DJ while his former mates have become middle-age parents. He must now finally put the memories of the canal to rest in a shocking manner. King's England is "brutal, inarticulate and unrelated to the sanitized working class of soap opera," according to Keith Martin, writing in the Times Literary Supplement. Martin also felt that King "writes with authority and insight about … working-class life." Mundy praised King's "dense stream of consciousness that spares nothing," and further noted that the novel is "a league ahead of much contemporary fiction." In another New Statesman review, Mundy also dubbed Human Punk an "epic novel" of the transformation of industrial England into a "bullying, fragmented, nihilistic country."

In King's 2001 novel, White Trash, he pits class against class in the confines of a hospital run by theNational Health Service (NHS). Ruby is a nurse in the hospital who loves her job and the people she works with, a solid working-class woman who likes to think the best of people. Mr. Jeffreys is a consultant for the NHS who is sent to the same hospital to analyze possible cost-cutting measures. For him, the patients and staff of the hospital are white trash, almost beneath his contempt, and he longs for the old class system that has now all but disappeared in England. His streamlining policies begin to take on the aspect of social cleansing, and when a patient dies under mysterious circumstances, Ruby and Mr. Jeffreys are fated to clash. In the end she manages to expose him as a "psychopathic villain, dispatching the expensively and terminally ill with his trusty antique syringe," according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Paul Magrs, who found that King "ends with a cheap fictional trick to drive his [class warfare] point home." The first of his novels to be published in the United States, White Trash was found to be "genuinely engrossing and utterly creepy" by a critic for Kirkus Reviews.

King is also the author of the 2004 novel, The Prison House, set in a notorious prison, Seven Towers, and featuring a young Englishman at a crossroads in his life.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2003, review of White Trash, p. 259.

New Statesman, May 8, 2000, Toby Mundy, review of Human Punk, p. 52; November 27, 2000, Toby Mundy, review of Human Punk, p. 46.

Sewanee Review, fall, 1998, Merritt Moseley, review of The Football Factory, pp. 675-582.

Times Literary Supplement, July 5, 1996, review of The Football Factory, p. 25; September 4, 1998, Theo Tait, review of England Away, p. 11; June 9, 2000, Keith Martin, review of Human Punk, p. 22; July 27, 2001, Paul Magrs, review of White Trash, p. 19.