The less than gentle men of Verona

Tim Parks is a brave man. The first chapter of his latest book, an account of one Italian football team's season, reveals the fans of Verona, a run-of-the-mill side in Italy's Serie A, at their least engaging and most brutish. It's pretty much a lexicon of abuse - and the swearing is no less banal than usual for being in Italian - from some of the most unpleasant and racist fans in Italy. As an introduction it's very dramatic, but it makes the next 450 pages - detailing Verona's season home and away - feel pretty forbidding. If Parks is trying to win our sympathy, it's a curious way of going about it.

Yet he gets away with it. As the story moves on, he shows a great deal more Hornbyesque introspection than yer average fan, and you realise Parks (as with his impressive, Italy-set novels), really knows what he's doing. Perhaps unavoidably, there's a good deal of overlap with Hornby. For example, he can't explain his own middle-class surprise at finding, when he finally meets them, that footballers don't have much of interest to say, or that he can forgive his own side's fouls, but not the opposition's.

He's very good on the hopeless sentimentality (to which he seems to plead guilty) of the fans, and even has a go at explaining why football is so absorbing to so many. Dicing with pseudery (but staying just the right side of it: Parks is not a timid writer, but a clever one), he quotes Schopenhauer in explaining that: "Behind any great experience of excessive grief or extravagant jubilation, there is always an error of thinking and a false belief." He then trumps this by relating the sport to a pre-soccer poem by that Martin Peters of the 1820s, Giacomo Leopardi. Better a thrilling error, agrees Parks, or any error at all, than the awful truth that the world is a "solid nothingness". Put differently: " Better to kneel before the TV in ecstasy when Scholes scores, and bang your head against the screen when Kanu equalises, than simply watch a blank screen." (I'll drink to that.) It is, says Parks, the purpose of any culture to foster collective self-deceit, to make us dream, as the fans' slogan has it. It is the ultimate achievement, the great stand against that "solid nothingness", to believe in something knowing it can't be so. How else could a fan say "I know we're going to lose in Turin today, and I believe we're going to win"?

This is not a philosophical tract, thankfully, but it is far from being a travel book either. The action away from Verona tells mostly of football games, stops in motorway service stations and football men displaying their inadequacies with women. I'd love to be able to say this is a book for non-football buffs, for those who bought Fever Pitch because it's a good book, not a football book. This is good too, and it does paint a picture of mounting racism in Italy and of the general edginess of the smaller northern towns, but at the end of the day, Brian, it's about football.

On that, and on Italian football in particular, he has some excellent passages. The best are on the bias and deference of referees worried by what might happen to them if the powerful big clubs start losing to "a bunch of unsavoury provincial racist also-rans", on the potty devotion of his fellow fans, and on fixed games (how come, on the last day of the season, in five key games the bookies' shortest odds were on the sides normally least likely to win?).

But what will appeal to any fan whose side has ever faced relegation is the finale, when Verona's struggle to avoid Serie B reaches its culmination. After 400 pages, when the charm of anyone else's team would be waning, it is thrilling. More remarkable still for football writing, there's not a cliché in the book.