72 Books and arts The EconomistJune 9th 2018
12 Russian Linesman.”
Fittingly, the linesman to whom that
name referred was not actually Russian.
His name was Tofiq Bahramov and he was
from Azerbaijan. Bahramov officiated at
the World Cup final of 1966, played be-
tween England and West Germany at
Wembley Stadium in London. With the
scores level in extra time, a shot by Geoff
Hurst, England’s striker, rattled the cross-
bar and bounced down over the goal line.
Or perhaps it didn’t: the German players
claimed to have seen chalk dust, indicating
that the ball hit the line and thus that the
goal should not be given. The referee
jogged across to consult Bahramov, who
briskly nodded an affirmative.
England won 4-2. English fans mostly
remember the fourth goal, scored in the fi-
nal seconds as the joyous crowd spilled
onto the pitch. But it is the third that is a
work of art. Just as Hamlet’s psychology
and the Mona Lisa’s smile become more
enigmatic with each viewing, however
many times you watch Mr Hurst’s shot,
you can never know for sure.- The tragic hero. The World Cup final
in Berlin in 2006 was the last game Zine-
dine Zidane ever played. He had already
won the tournament once, spurring France
to victory in 1998. After that, he was more
than a footballer. In a country where Jean-
Marie Le Pen of the National Front made it
to the run-off in the next presidential elec-
tion, Mr Zidane—the son of an Algerian
warehouseman—became the face of a
more tolerant France. Crowds in Paris
chanted for him to be president.
The match in Berlin was heading for a
penalty shoot-out; Mr Zidane, France’s
captain, had already scored one in the
game. With ten minutes to go, an Italian de-
fender muttered something to him (about
his mother, Mr Zidane alleged; only about
his sister, the defender maintained). Mr Zi-
dane headbutted the Italian in the chest.
He was sent off. France lost the shoot-out.
This implosion was a tragedy in the pur-
est sense. A tragedy, wrote Aristotle in the
fourth centuryBC, depicts the fall of a great
but flawed man, and hinges on aperipeteia,
or sudden reversal, like the Italian defend-
er’s slur. For Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French
intellectual, the meltdown represented the
“suicide of a demigod”—a tragic hero of
whom too much has been demanded.
Watch the scene closely, and there is in-
deed something oddly composed in Mr Zi-
dane’s demeanour as, jogging away from
his opponent, he hears, stops,and turns
back to meet his fate.- A crack in everything.According to
the Japanese aesthetic known aswabi-
sabi,beauty is not perfect but flawed and
incomplete. Leonard Cohen expressed the
same thought in “Anthem”: “Forget your
perfect offering/There is a crack in every-
thing/That’s how the light gets in.” So, inad-
vertently, did Pelé, after he won the race
with the Uruguayan goalkeeper.
Perhaps no one but Pelé would have
done what he did next. He did nothing. His
mind whirring faster than his feet, he did
not touch the ball, as the keeper expected,
but let it run on—hastily collecting it, after
hiscoup de théâtre, on the other side of his
opponent. Pelé shot towards the unguard-
ed goal—but scuffed his kick and missed.
He still avenged his father and theMa-
racanazo. Brazil beat Uruguay and won the
final, in which Pelé scored. Still, much later
he said he had dreams in which, after that
audacious moment of restraint, his aim
was true: “It would have been so much
more beautiful had it gone in.” He may be
the greatest football artist of alltime, but,
about this, Pelé is wrong. The kink in the
masterpiece is what makes it human. 7
O
NE of them was apublishing machine
with scores of bestsellers under his
belt. The other knew the White House like
the back of his hand (because he lived in it
for eight years). Together they made a per-
fect thriller-writing team. Or so claims the
marketing for Bill Clinton’s debut novel,
“The President is Missing”, co-written with
James Patterson, whose books have sold
over 375m copies. Insider knowledge!
Thrills and spills! More of the latter than
the former, it turns out.
In what seems a case of wish-fulfilment
in more ways than one, “The President is
Missing” features a morally unimpeach-able president—a former soldier who was
captured and tortured by the enemy but
never said a word (his middle name is Lin-
coln rather than Jefferson). Now he is
stressed, sick and grieving, juggling bitter
enemies and uncertain friends. Suddenly
he faces a crisis of such magnitude that it
involves saving not only America from ca-
tastrophe, but probably the entire human
race. “Not since Kennedy stared down
Khrushchev over the missiles in Cuba has
our nation been this close to world war,”
the president muses. To stand any chance
of success, he must go spectacularly off-
piste. Hence the title.
Alas, “The President is Missing” is itself
missing some things that might have im-
proved it. It is short ofreal political insight,
which is surprising. There is no sex, which
may or may not be even more surprising.
What it offers instead are 128 chapters of
breathless, onward-rushing, monosyllabic
prose and enough twisty plotting to give
the reader a bad case of whiplash (mixed
metaphors intentional). The storyline
swings back and forth between the presi-
dent and his pals—an imposing chancellor
of Germany called Juergen Richter who
looks “like something out of British royal-
ty”, a Russian prime ministerwith an iron
handshake and a gushyIsraeli premier.
“You know that Israel will never leave your
side,” she assures the president.
The assembled global uppy-ups and
dirty low-lifers spend the book hopping
across highways and down cul-de-sacs.
The plot is epic and unlikely, and includes
such grand concerns as terrorism, comput-
er shutdowns, the threat of chaos, civil dis-
order, and death on a gigantic scale. As a
helpful timer ticks down the minutes, the
denouement comes with just three sec-
onds to spare. There are baddies who turn
out to be goodies, and a goody who turns
out to be very bad indeed: an ambitious
woman with a soul shrivelled by envy.Presidential fictionGood guy with a
gun
The President is Missing.By Bill Clinton
and James Patterson. Little, Brown and
Knopf; 528 pages; $30. Century; £20Trouble at t’mill