Keeper by Mal Peet is a remarkable book and one unlike any other that I've read for this age and ability group. It combines a demanding and imaginative storyline with the kind of sophisticated writing more usually seen in the more literary novels for adults. Yet the themes of father figures, landscape and identity, ambition, and personal fulfillment, played out through the medium of football are such that there are no major social concerns for a reader of any age in our group. It is the perfect G&T book in that sense.
Paul Faustino is South America's top sports journalist and the novel begins as he sits down in his office with the goalkeeper known as El Gato, the cat,who has been part of the un-named team that has just won the world cup. Faustino is expecting a fairly ordinary tale of the keeper's poverty-striken childhood as the son of a poor logger in the jungle, and a typical rise through the ranks of players to the national team. What he gets stuns not only Faustino but also us, the readers, for Keeper is magic realism for kids.
Not always El Gato, as a child the keeper thought he was no good at football, he was known as La Cigüeña, or the stork. Gato's village was in a forest clearing and he was warned off the forest by his superstious grandmother but once the other kids banned him from playing he wandered off alone. There, as he says, he didn't find so much what he wanted, as it found him. He meets the mysterious ethreal Keeper, a ghostly, shamanic figure who appears only in one place (apart from one incident later in the book), an immaculate and unlikely football pitch away from any of the forest paths. And the Keeper and his teaching changes La Cigüeña into El Gato. It is football, but it is the psychology of football, the myth and mystery of football, not Roy of the Rovers.
Magic realism, the presentation of the fantastical as though it is real usually without explanation, and often to make a political point, has drawn some very impressive practioners to its style ranks over the years, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie to name but three, and it, appropriately for this novel, can be very strongly considered as Latin American, as writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez etc, show. In taking this Latin American style along side the South American setting Peet is echoing the work of Louis de Bernières whose South American novels are also in the magic realism tradition. In this then , as in so many other ways, Keeper is such a grown-up book.
Magic Realism for children is a slightly odd idea as they, nutured on fairy tales, may see nothing odd in the presentation of the fabulous along side the real. The execrable Rainbow Fairies series for younger girls (very pink, very glittery, very predicatable, very poverty striken in imaginative terms) places two ordinary girls Kirsty and Rachel who do ordinary things in situations where they interact with a parallel fairyland. Similarly, the children in Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree series live with mother and do chores before interacting with magic in the forest not unlike our goalkeeping hero does in Keeper. Yet no one would makes claims for Rainbow Fairies or The Faraway Tree to be magic realism.
What lifts Keeper further than mere fairy tale is clever and complex. The narration for a start utilises adults. Faustino, who like us is a narratee receiving the main narration, is clearly an adult, probably someway into middle age. A brave move for a children's book. The second narrator within the text is El Gato himself and whilst he is a younger man, he is undoubtedly also an adult. In fact for a children's book there are remarkably few children or teenagers in it. Our child reader's point of interest is that our hero is just 12 or so when the story begins, when our adult keeper starts his recollections, so their empathy is heavily directed towards the main character as he lives his life and strives to find out who he really is. But El Gato is already an adult and we know he has won the world cup, so this is clearly not a linear story (again, how grown-up). We're obviously not meant to wonder about that outcome, we're meat to listen to the rustling political sub-texts of the plot. The fanastical Keeper is shown to us through the eyes of adults, to emphasis the strangeness, the magicalness, of the acceptance of this reality. When magic doesn't go just because you're grown-up, then it is truly Magic, and a magic beyond mere football.
So what is it about if not football? Well football (and there is a lot of brilliantly described football, described from within the head not by the feet nor the roar of the crowd) certainly forms the centre of the book, but about it spin the themes. How does Gato interact with the men of his family, what of his mother's hopes for him, and what of the forest that his father and the other loggers do daily battle with? And here's the politics: its an eco-tale of rainforest destruction. Of the power of the forest to inspire and destroy, and of human greed and need for nothing to stand in the way of progress. Of what sort of men we should make into heroes, and of what heroes really do. Play for Real Madrid or right social wrongs? Is El Gato a shaman? What have the forest and the spirits taught him?
I've stated all that very baldly, but the narrative is very subtle. Whilst Gato's decisions become clear in the last pages there is no sense in which the main omniscient narrator preaches: in fact we are shown throughout that what we don't understand is often more important than what we do.
This book is not just for football fans, it is not just for boys, and it is not just for children or teenagers. I loved this book, and I know it will be one I'll re-read. Keeper is the first of three books by Peet featuring Paul Faustino.
Watch points:
Death: Gato's father dies, knocked into a ditch by a tree where he drowns in the mud. This is described at the end of the book, and though Gato is clearly disturbed by the death, it is not over-played within the text. The mysterious Keeper is not a shaman but part of the spirit world, and why becomes clear at the end of the book.
Violence: a jealous colleague has Gato followed by men with knives at one point, but otherwise there is nothing worse than what you see on Match of the Day.
Peril: the fear of the unknown, the slightly spooky nature of the forest and fear of failure are all present. Nothing the average 9+ couldn't handle.
Religion: this is very spiritual and mystical book throughout : this is the element in which it swims. There is no overt religiousity however.
Anything else: Paul Faustino smokes (which seems appropriate somehow, it is how an old fashioned journalist should look). There is a long description of a big cat hunting - related to the football.
Overall: A truly grown-up, remarkable book that both entertains and demands your respect for the writer on every page. Entirely suitable for 9+ but feels like a work for adults. Wonderful, sensitive, tactful, tasteful, imaginative, sophisticated and elegant throughout. One of my books of the decade.
Other reviews and useful sites:
The author's own site is here.
There is a review in The Guardian here by Jan Mark which argues for a Fisher King/Arthurian view of the book, a review on Kirkus here, and an interview in The Telegraph here.
There is a review by a 12 year old by on BBC Norfolk's page here. (Peet is from Norfolk).
There is a blog review on Persnicketysnark here.
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