Riot by Appointment

TITLE: AMONG THE THUGS

AUTHOR: BILL BUFORD

PUBLISHER: NORTON; 317 PAGES; $22.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: A chronicle of violence among Britain’s soccer hooligans.

The title of Bill Buford’s first book is disturbingly apt. The ancient Hindu practitioners of thuggee strangled their victims amid much ritual and in so doing attained a state of religious ecstasy. Surprisingly little direct killing occurs at the hands of Buford’s modern-day thugs — the soccer hooligans of Britain who consecrate their Saturdays to violence. But their battles are ritualistic in their choreographed precision, and the effects on the participants are mind bending as the adrenaline pumps, the fists fly and the boots drive into the sides and skulls of the fallen. “They talk about the crack, the buzz, and the fix,” Buford records. “They talk about having to have it, of being unable to forget it when they do, of not wanting to forget it — ever.” After participating in one battle between rival team supporters, Buford recalls the “absolute completeness” of the experience.

It is a strange epiphany for an American who went to Britain as a scholar at Cambridge and stayed on to revive and edit the successful literary magazine Granta. Buford’s sojourn among the thugs began on an ordinary Saturday in 1982 after returning home in the company of berserk soccer fans bent on tearing $ apart their train. To find out “why young males in England were rioting every Saturday,” he joined the drunken legions of Daft Donalds, Barmy Bernies and Steamin’ Sammys as they rampaged around Europe like latter-day Storm Troopers, trashing cities and forcing hooligan into the vocabulary of much of the Continent.

At times Buford’s mesmerizing account borders on the Dave Barry-esque. “Looking around me,” he recalls as the lads of Manchester United’s feared Red Brigade run riot in the unsuspecting Italian city of Turin, “I realized that I was no longer surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants; I was now surrounded by raving, hysterically nationalistic social deviants in a frenzy.” But even black humor bows out as Buford’s tale of unrelenting, mindless violence and moronic patriotism unfolds, and the “lad culture” with its bloated code of maleness centered on the Saturday rite of soccer is revealed in all its crude nihilism.

Most crowd psychologists practice from a position of safety beyond the barricades. Buford clambers over them to become one with the crowd — one of the lads. He experiences perverse satisfaction on one occasion when he is included in the Red Brigade’s order of battle. In the crowd riots at the World Cup in 1990 he is mistaken by the Italian police for a ringleader and beaten senseless. It is a punishing climax to an eight-year quest.

Does that make Buford barmy too? Eight years is a long time to spend reaching the banal conclusion that “the crowd is in all of us.” But Buford’s investigation contains more than the mere revelation that the savagery of the crowd is infectious, or that violence is a narcotic. After searching for the reasons behind the calculated thuggery, Buford rejects the conventional explanations. Yes, the British working class has always been violent. Yes, soccer hooliganism is also symptomatic of the “rot of our times.” But the brutish Brits depicted by Buford are not rebelling against economic or social oppression. There is no hidden explanation. “This bored, empty, decadent generation,” he concludes, “consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell.” And the smell is pungent: it has the reek of the clockwork orange as the mechanism spins out of control.