Such a verdict would probably not be its author's ambition.
The author's ambition is to paint a "portrait of Latin America's largest country seen through its passion for football".
The connective tissue between the landmark moment of desegregation and the story of Cox and his curiously sagging football team is not strong enough to sustain the author's ambition.
Faulks does attempt to link his stories both through theme and occasionally character or inanimate object, but those threads are so thin that they don't carry the weight of the author's ambition in this regard.
It is difficult today to appreciate that this obeisance to antique models had a liberating effect; one must recall that imitation of the ancients entailed rejecting scriptural allegory and asserting the individual author's ambition to create works that would be unashamedly great and beautiful.
The resonance of "Hook Man Speaks" stems from the integrity of the story and the charisma of the writing rather than from the breadth of the author's ambition, and its small success should make us eager to watch this writer's development.
