The Road to Lisbon: A brief introduction

WELCOME to our blog. My name is Charlie McGarry, co-author of The Road to Lisbon.

The novel, for those who don’t already know, is dual narrative; that is, it’s written in the first-person of two separate voices. One is Celtic’s legendary manager Jock Stein, and the other is a fictional Celtic supporter, Tim Lynch.

I wrote the Tim Lynch narrative, Martin Greig wrote the Jock Stein one.

I chose the name ‘Tim’ to coincide with that nickname for Celtic supporters, thus making him a kind of generic representation of all Celtic fans. Certainly he comes from a typically Celtic background. He is third generation Irish and was brought up in the largely Catholic ghetto of the Gorbals.

I reckon I had an easier job than Martin, in that I was creating Tim out of the ether, and wasn’t constricted by the historical reality of a particular person who actually lived and breathed quite recently, and whose life has been recorded in some considerable detail. People often say that novelists tend to base fictional protagonists upon themselves. While I’m sure that this inevitably holds a modicum of truth, I think that it’s quite an unconscious process.

Certainly there are a lot of outward differences between myself and Tim, not least that he’s a bit of a tough guy who used to run with a notorious street gang!

The two narratives of Jock and Tim are over the seven days up to and including May 25th 1967, the day that Celtic became the first non-Latin football club to win the European Cup. There isn’t actually that much direct overlap between the two stories, but we, and I think more importantly everyone who has read it, says that it works well.

The story alternates from one voice to another, several times within each day. There are a lot of flashbacks, particularly in Jock’s narrative.

The match itself, in which Celtic destroyed Inter Milan with an outrageous display of attacking play, is obviously a shared experience between Tim and Jock as they are both present at the stadium. Martin and I deliberated for quite a long time over how to best represent this, and we decided to tell the highlights of the game chronologically, with one piece of action told by Jock, and the next by Tim, then back to Jock, and so on. It’s the part of the book that I’m most proud of, which is just as well, because this match is sacred to Celtic fans the world over and we really needed to do it justice.