An uproarious yarn of an underdog team and its overdog owner takes in a shadowy criminal cartel, a stolen Dalí and the social tensions of a nation
In August 2016, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the start of a preseason game. The decision, he explained, was a silent protest at what he saw as a culture of police brutality, racial inequality and a systemic bias against minorities within the criminal justice system. The “take the knee” protest has since gone viral. It has been adopted by more than 200 players, threw the 2017 season into crisis and outraged Donald Trump, who derides the protesters as treacherous ingrates and wants them all to be fired. Previously a well-oiled bastion of monopoly capitalism (exclusively white-owned, yet disproportionately reliant on black talent), the NFL is in danger of becoming a revolutionary hotbed.
Sergio de la Pava’s freewheeling Lost Empress is a novel implicitly born out of these ongoing upheavals. Boldly billing itself as “a protest”, the book takes hold of American football and duly hot-wires it to the national grid, so that the sparks jump across a matrix that extends from stadium sport to the prison system to a shadowy criminal cartel known as the Absence. Reading it is a little like being accosted by a brilliant conspiracy theorist on the night bus home: assuming we go with the flow and ward off the occasional moments of outright exasperation, we may just come away converted.
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