Book Review: Helen Garner’s The Season

Helen Garner’s 2024 book The Season follows her grandson’s suburban footy team in the AFL-mad suburbs of Melbourne. She is present at almost every game and training session, shivering on the sidelines in the dark, captivated by the spectacle of AFL. A passionate Western Bulldogs supporter, Garner is not just an admirer of the team but of the theatre and humanity of the game itself.

But The Season is about more than football; it’s also a quiet reflection on the fleeting moments of childhood, as Garner connects with her youngest grandchild, Amby, in his final season before stepping into manhood. As with many books before, Garner subtly interrogates gender, age, class, and race relations in Australian suburbia, all veiled beneath the seemingly apolitical façade of AFL.

While someone unfamiliar with AFL could appreciate this book, it’s honestly not written for them. This is not a beginner’s guide to the sport. Unlike many books written from a fan’s perspective, The Season unapologetically assumes an understanding of the game’s vernacular, rituals, and spirit. This makes it both refreshing and deeply personal, an unfiltered and unashamed glimpse into the homes and hearts of suburban Australia.

Even Garner’s own description of the book as a “nanna’s book about footy” is telling of this way of understanding. It gestures towards a “non-legitimate” way of understanding AFL. This is one that prioritizes people over stats, emotion over analysis. This deeply resonated with me, as it reflects the way my mum taught me to understand football. A non-masculine reading of the game passed down through grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and aunties.

Throughout the book, Garner insists she doesn’t really understand AFL but this is unreliable, While she positions herself on the sidelines, she is clearly more deeply entrenched than she claims. She’s invested in Amby’s game, spotting him in the pack, observing his team, the Colts, and analysing the Western Bulldogs’ game flow. She takes note of positional shifts and develops her own clever interpretations. Although Garner casts herself as a mere observer, she bears witness with profound insight. This is certainly a legitimate way of understanding the game, even if she can't see it. 

Her emboldened language elevates football to something religious. Describing a game as “a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry.” This moment perfectly captures her “unreliable” narrator status because no one truly on the sidelines could describe the game with such beauty and reverence.

Garner’s use of language reflects her awe. The game becomes a performance, the players soaring and dancing in unison. Her descriptions are athletic, poetic, almost spiritual. She refers to players as “men as Gods”, a depiction that is admittedly problematic, but it rings true in a place like Melbourne, where high-profile AFL players are immortalised. Importantly, she later interrogates and breaks down this view. In a revealing reflection, she writes: “All my life I’ve fought men, lived under their regimes, been limited and frustrated by their power…but having never raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility....”

In The Season, Garner returns to her familiar themes: masculinity and its codes, the contradictions of social groups, the act of bearing witness. But this time, it’s through the lens of footy training drills, half-time oranges, and cold mornings on the sidelines.

The Season is a book about every season, not just the footy one. It’s about weird haircuts, family dynamics, the Melbourne skyline, ageing, tactics, and friendship. For me, it’s been a mirror. It reflected something intimate and true and for that reason, it has earned a place not just in my heart, but in my top five books of all time.

I give this book: 5/5

I recommend this book for: AFL Fans, People who have grown up in a suburban sports club, Your grandma that calls the AFL players ‘my boys’