Legendary

"Maybe I am not very human - what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house." Edward Hopper

"Maybe, on the day I caressed a ball for the first time, the sun was shining, people were happy, and it made me feel like playing football. All my life, I'll try to capture that moment again." Eric Cantona

Cantona: The Rebel Who Would Be King by Philippe Auclair is a good book which could have been better. There is a moment, during the part on Cantona's last season where he says:

I hope I'll be forgiven, though, for not sticking to the day-to-day account of Cantona's progress in The Premiership as I've done up to this point.

And one greets that sentence with relief, for sometimes the book verges on a too dry telling, reading like the classified football results of a Saturday afternoon. Something which could have been avoided: he says in the foreword that he left some things out of the final version:

I ... took the liberty to extract from my original draft a number of digressions - some of them of an anecdotal nature, others more akin to essays - which, whilst giving a sense of context to Eric's story, would also have interrupted the narrative flow...

Some of the best parts of the book are in those "digressions" which remain. They add flavour to the otherwise dry telling of events - the events are well-told, well-written and well-researched, but sometimes one feels as if this straightforward telling of events leaves something out.
For instance in recounting Eric's childhood, it could have been rewarding to speculate a bit more on how the adult Cantona grew out of the child, and given how he opens the book with the Cantona quote which opens this review, the reasons behind this comment - how this desire for a memory of childhood affected Cantona the footballer. There are hints: someone recalls, "a child who was far too easily indulged by his parents," and he speaks of the "idealized vision" which Cantona spoke of as his youth:

Whenever Cantona himself has spoken of his childhood, which he has often done, it has always been in nostalgic terms, as if the higgledy-piggledy house on the hill had been built in some Arcadia.

And yet we have no speculation on how this made Cantona. A lot of children are spoiled by their parents without turning into Cantona, just as a lot of people remember their childhood (too) fondly without becoming great artists. These could have made for great "digressions," indeed they would probably not be digressions at all.
A digression which does make it is one on the footballer as artist, and it is this type of thing which I feel the book could have done with more of. Auclair is led to the digression by this goal by Cantona



and he goes on to discuss Cantona in terms of the frustrated artist - frustrated because, "no sportsman is an artist." Here I disagree with him, why is no sportsman an artist? For Auclair it is because the sporting act is unrepeatable and because it is transient - not "immortal." And yet aren't both these arguments wrong? If dance and theatre are arts - essentially unrepeatable - then why not football? And since when was art immortal? Sarah Bernhardt is considered one of the greatest actresses ever, even though her stage was the theatre and thus no longer recoverable; all we have of Sappho's poetry is fragments, yet she is still considered as one of the finest poets. Can we not see a certain modern prejudice here - that with technology only that which is reproducible can be considered art? Many artists have written things which play on their very non-reproducibility, John Cage has written works which can never be performed the same way twice, relying on the contingency of their performance and there are similar works in the theatre. It was only in the first half of the 20th century that Walter Benjamin wrote "The Work of Art in The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction" and discussed the loss of the "Aura" of the artwork in its reproduction, from there to only allowing reproducible works to be art in such a short time... Rather than Cantona as frustrated at not being an artist, wouldn't we be better served viewing him as a frustrated artist - frustrated at the lack of perfection inherent to the artwork? Art is both a high achievement of humanity, but at the same time a removal from the simple existence of humanity, "Maybe I wasn't very human..." In this we see Cantona's contempt for the "water-carriers" of football, not as a criticism of others but as a refusal to accept the limits of his own humanity - and this is why he has become both an artist and a legend. So while I disagreed with this digression it still added to the book, took us out of the dry telling of events into speculation on precisely why Cantona was Cantona.
This quibble aside the book is good, for those unfamiliar with Cantona it provides a good starting point, and for those already in the know, it provides a fresh look, with the author having interviewed many people, and checked all the sources, books, newspaper reports, interviews, etc., to come up with definitive accounts of events (if not motivations). A couple of favourite moments, this story on Cantona and Neil Ruddock - Neil Ruddock had been riling Cantona all game, Cantona retaliated and got booked and then (via the words of Sir Alex):

Eric warned Ruddock that he would be waiting for an explanation, "man-to-man", in the tunnel at the end of the game. Once the game was over, Ruddock must have done at least three laps of honour and spent ten minutes saluting the Liverpool fans ... but Eric was waiting, Ruddock knew it. And I, down there, I was trying to push Eric towards the dressing room. Fucking hell! He was one tough guy!"

And this look at the number 7 shirt and its place in Manchester United folklore, after noting that George Best "played two-thirds of his games with United wearing the no. 11 shirt, he goes on:

The legend was constructed a posteriori, once Cantona had imbued the sacred digit with an aura that only grew with his retirement, to the extent that it acquired fetishistic qualities for his successors David Beckham and Christiano Ronaldo, who tattooed, etched, marquetted and embroidered it wherever possible, on their skin, coffee tables, bed cushions and lines of ready-to-wear. Their obsession can be understood as a desire to inhabit a myth at the so-called 'Theatre of Dream," but it primarily remains, consciously or not, an hommage to the myth-maker himself - Eric Cantona

And perhaps therein lies the only problem with the book - One should not set out to find the man behind the legend, removing the aura through dry retelling, but always to find the legend within the man.