David Peace has spent three decades writing about the dark history of England – from a safe distance. Since 1974, the first novel in his Red Riding Quartet, was published in 1999, Peace has produced 12 novels, the majority of which explore England’s complex and fragmented past, though he relocated to Tokyo in 1994.
The quartet – 1974 was followed, between 2000 and 2002, by the books 1977, 1980 and 1983 – tells the story of the Yorkshire Ripper killings, exploring how these crimes haunted British society. (The stories were adapted into an acclaimed TV miniseries in 2009.) GB84, a novel about the 1984-85 miners’ strike, was published in 2004, exploring the fragmentation of Britain during the biggest labour dispute in the UK’s postwar history.
The writer’s work has been dubbed “Dewsbury noir” thanks to his focus on historical, violent crimes in working-class northern towns. “There just aren’t that many working-class stories around today,” Peace, 57, told me when we met at the Manchester Literature Festival in October. “That’s why I wish there were more football novels.”
Peace’s most commercially successful novel, The Damned United, a biographical exploration of Brian Clough’s brief spell as manager of Leeds, was published in 2006 and adapted into a film starring Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall in 2009. His latest novel, Munichs, tackles one of the biggest sporting tragedies in British history: in 1958, a plane carrying (among other passengers) the Manchester United football team crashed on take-off, killing more than half of those on board. In the aftermath, a team rapidly assembled to replace those lost or recovering managed to reach the final of the FA Cup. “How the survivors and families and the communities and the team kept going in the aftermath of Munich is an important and under-told part of the story,” Peace told me. “Not only of Man United but of the history of this country – the working-class history of this country.”
Peace’s work interrogates the many tensions that arise in the north of England around state corruption and the surrender of public bodies to the private sector. His novels explore the erasure of the economic state and the withdrawal of the social state, alongside a wider examination of the roots of economic neoliberalism, the rise of the far right and the decay of social cohesion. Read together, they offer an extended meditation on the decline of the British working classes, the slow death of trade unionism and socialism, and the rise of individualism and capitalist realism across the second half of the 20th century.
Although football is England’s national sport, Peace believes it has been relatively invisible in British literary culture. Munichs is the third in Peace’s loose trilogy of football novels: it follows The Damned United and 2013’s Red or Dead, which details Bill Shankly’s term at Liverpool. In 2016, a stage adaptation of The Damned United kick-started a revival of football-themed productions: a stage adaptation of Red or Dead is due to open at the Liverpool Royal Court in spring next year, and James Graham’s hit Dear England is returning to the National Theatre. Yet the novel as a form remains reluctant to engage with sport as a subject matter. “I’m amazed there aren’t more novels about football – novels about sport generally, but football in particular – because football is all about narratives,” Peace said. “As a kid, before you even know who players are, you’re told these stories. Football is nothing without narratives.”
Much like his crime novels, Peace’s football novels are full of working-class protagonists: he aims to reinsert radical working-class histories of the game into the national story. In Munichs, he hoped to celebrate the resilience of the communities of Manchester as well as examine the city’s grief: “Positive stories about the working class are few and far between these days,” he said. “We need to make more space for positive representations.”
Peace was born in 1967 and grew up in Ossett, West Yorkshire. He studied English at Manchester Polytechnic, graduating in 1991, before working between jobs on his first novel, which he now bluntly describes as “pretentious shit”. When the Conservative Party won a fourth consecutive term in 1992, he decided it was time to leave the UK. After spending two years in Istanbul, he relocated to Tokyo, where he still lives with his wife and their grown-up children.
Following his father’s death in May 2022, Peace returned to the UK to sort through his father’s effects, including his collection of memorabilia from the time of the Munich disaster. “My father saw the [Busby] Babes play their final game at Arsenal before their ill-fated journey back from Belgrade,” Peace said. “The next thing he saw was the placard on the newspaper stand in London about the crash.”
Like GB84, Munichs focuses on a national trauma retold from the perspectives of multiple characters: survivor Bobby Charlton’s trajectory in Germany, for example, is counterposed with the perspective of his mother, Cissie Charlton, at home. “Tragedies don’t just happen to one person – they happen to many people, and they’re experienced in many different ways. The people who survived and the people back home who lost loved ones. That’s the principal reason behind the [plural] title Munichs.”
The novel’s narrators clash in their recollections of key events. Their accounts contradict one another, at times creating confusion for the reader. But this jarring of fact and fiction is key to Peace’s approach to storytelling. During his “painstaking” research for Munichs, he found that, “much like when I was researching Brian Clough, there are key dates and details in biographies that get mixed up. In recognition of that, in one section of the book I tell the same event from three different perspectives that each give different accounts. I don’t know which is the right version: all versions have their own merits.”
Munichs does not shy away from the criticism Manchester United faced at the time of the crash that it was “surfing on sympathy”. Terrace chants such as “You should have died at Munich!” pepper the post-crash period in the novel. “One of the surprising things was that when United played certain teams following the crash, people threw things at some of the surviving players, and [some] even received poison-pen letters from United fans suggesting they should step aside and let the younger players take their place on the team,” Peace said. “It’s reassuring to see that it’s not all Twitter – some of us have always been pretty awful when it comes to abusing footballers.”
Peace believes the disaster was “a turning point… the end of the football that defined the period before. Something had been lost, for Man United and for the England team. But there were also wider changes in the game that Munich accelerated. The Busby Babes were a phenomenon before the disaster: they had trend-setting haircuts, hit singles and books; in a way they were the harbingers of the celebrity world of football that we know today.”
And what of the club today? Peace admitted that Manchester United “have been in touch… but my novel is probably not going to be for sale in the club shop any time soon”.
George Orwell once said the British sporting spirit is “like war, minus the shooting” – a playing field defined by “hatred, jealousy, boastfulness and disregard of all rules”. In a new era of politics for both the UK and the US, Munichs suggests the trauma of our sporting and political lives has never been more closely intertwined.
[See also: Chris Hoy’s race against time]
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This article appears in the 27 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Optimist’s Dilemma