The oldest sport in the world

This is the best book you’ll ever read about mixed martial arts fighting; and this will still be the case even if it’s not the first book you’ve ever read about mixed martial arts fighting. Kerry Howley’s debut is a riotously entertaining and piercingly perceptive account of the contrasting lives and dreams of a pair of Iowa-based fighters whose battles in the ‘Octagon’ become the vehicle for a philosophical treatise on the nature of glory.

One of these fighters, Sean Huffman, is a journeyman; the other, Erik Koch, has dreams of the big time which, in this instance, means Las Vegas. Huffman, by contrast, makes do with dingy fights in hotel function rooms in a succession of no-name Iowa towns. Koch has an entourage; Howley is Huffman’s entourage or, as she puts it, she becomes his ‘spacetaker’. She tracks her fighters’ dreams and disappointments assiduously and her writing is as lithe and punchy as her subjects are in the Octagon.

The story is narrated through the eyes of ‘Kit’, a fictional philosophy student at the University of Iowa. This device allows for an arch measure of distance to be created, separating the author from her subjects. It is the kind of ploy that has dismayed some of Howley’s prissier American reviewers. How can you trust a non-fiction book written by a fictional narrator?

This, it seems to me, misses the point — which is that all narratives are but one version of a truth as viewed from one particular perspective. All non-fictions of this type are reliably unreliable. Another version of Huffman and Koch’s stories, told at another time or from another angle, would necessarily be different and just as true.

In any case, the fighters are only part of the story.