Review: RED OR DEAD by David Peace

‘Repetition. Repetition. Repetition.’ The first three words of David Peace’s RED OR DEAD (Faber & Faber) are key to unlocking not only the 700-plus pages of the novel, but also the philosophy upon which legendary manager Bill Shankly built the fortunes of England’s most successful football club, Liverpool FC.
  Shankly arrived at Liverpool in 1959, when the club was mired in Second Division mediocrity. As a player Shankly had captained Scotland and won the FA Cup with Preston North End, but his managerial career at Carlisle, Grimsby Town and Huddersfield Town was unremarkable prior to joining Liverpool. A life-long socialist, Shankly blended his philosophy in life with the financial resources of Liverpool Football Club and tapped into the dormant passion of the club’s supporters. By the time of his shock retirement in 1974, Liverpool FC had won three First Division Championships, two FA Cups and the UEFA Cup. In place were the fundamentals that would yield, by the time of his death in 1981, a further four Championships, three European Cups, a League Cup, a UEFA Cup and a UEFA Super Cup.
  It’s those fundamentals that concern David Peace. The author made his reputation as the author of the ‘Red Riding Quartet’, crime novels set against the backdrop of the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper which featured a distinctively clipped, telegraphic style. He arrived in the mainstream as the author of THE DAMNED UTD, an account of Brian Clough’s ill-fated 44-day tenure as the manager of Leeds United in 1974.
  Peace combines a unique style with a football story in RED OR DEAD, those repetitions (“Bill stared out at the line. In the garden, in the rain. The pouring rain. The empty, hanging line. Redundant in the rain.”) emphasising Bill Shankly’s approach to football, which focused on reducing the game to its most basic tenets and repeating them over and over again. Initially irritating, the repetitive style soon takes on a hypnotic quality, a lulling rhythm of everyday routines irregularly punctuated by triumph and failure.
  The style also incorporates Shankly’s attention to detail, and his famed use of psychology. To ensure a daily and intimate identification with the club, for example, the Liverpool players changed at Anfield and then took the bus to their training ground at Melwood, rather than togging out at the training ground, as most football clubs did.
  If the style is the book’s most notable feature on first encounter, however, it’s very much a novel on the theme of substance. Shankly, who believed himself a born socialist, and who worked down a coalmine before becoming a professional footballer, had a vision of how a football club should interact not only with its supporters (‘the People’, as Shankly called them), but also the club’s heartland. Despite all Liverpool’s success, Shankly never lost sight of the importance of the imperishable bond between the players on the pitch and ‘the People’ on the Kop.
  It’s a hagiography, of course, and David Peace makes little attempt to hide his admiration for Shankly and the way he went about his work. It’s a hagiography in the mediaeval style, however, in which a man is praised not for who he is, but according to the stark testimony of his deeds. Even more than Bill Shankly, however, it is the game of football itself, and its importance to its working-class constituency, which is the recipient of Peace’s love letter. Bill Shankly, for all his charisma and achievements, is simply the man who represents for Peace the incarnation of the game’s significance.
  There’s a caveat, of course: I’m a football fan, and I can’t say how a reader who isn’t a fan will cope with the minutiae of, say, training sessions that took place five decades ago. For this Liverpool fan the book is a joy, a powerful and moving tale of how, to paraphrase Bill Shankly, football isn’t simply a matter of life or death, but the stuff of life itself. – Declan Burke

David Peace will be appearing at Eason’s on O’Connell Street, Dublin, on Tuesday, August 20th, where he will be interviewed by Paul Howard. For all the details, clickety-click here …

Erm, Have We Had A ‘Dear Genre’ Post Yet This Week?

Kevin Power reviewed the latest Paul Howard novel, MR S AND THE SECRETS OF ANDORRA’S BOX, in the Irish Times yesterday, Paul Howard being the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a Falstaffian comic foil that has allowed Howard skewer the pretensions of Celtic Tiger Ireland over the course of nine novels. The gist of Power’s review runneth thusly:

Irish fiction hasn’t kept up with Irish reality. So we get “literary” novels about paedophile priests, novels about the Famine, novels in which farmers walk the fields - but who pops into Starbucks and orders a grande chai latte with soy? During the last decade few novelists have bothered to notice what modern Ireland is actually like. This is terrain that Paul Howard … has made his own, seeing - or, more accurately, hearing - what the Irish really are, in south Dublin anyway … You will search the pages of our more distinguished literary novelists in vain for this kind of thing. When was the last time you read a novelist whose ear for the way some Irish people speak was so acute that he was capable of writing a sentence like “Just going back to what you were saying there about the whole non-national thing”?

  About two weeks ago, actually, when I read Kevin Power’s BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK. Power’s novel deals with the same strata of Irish society as Howard’s, albeit in a more serious vein. While I believe that the culture both men target is so hollow as to defy satire – Howard’s novels are much closer in tone to farce – Power certainly recreated the mini-cosmos with a deft touch, in the process showcasing a sharp ear for dialogue.
  Having said that, you have to wonder why Power ignores novels other than “literary” ones when making his point about fiction not dealing with the ‘real Ireland’. There are many examples of women’s fiction, aka chick lit, nailing the zeitgeist, the best and most popular being Marian Keyes. And, naturally, there are any amount of crime fiction novels that do so too. In 2008 alone we’ve had Declan Hughes’s THE DYING BREED, Tana French’s THE LIKENESS, Brian McGilloway’s GALLOWS LANE, Andrew Nugent’s SOUL MURDER, and Ingrid Black’s CIRCLE OF THE DEAD.
  You can argue in your own time about the literary merits, or otherwise, of those novels, although I’d argue that when it comes to storytelling, language is a tool akin to the sculptor’s chisel or the filmmaker’s camera – in other words, it needs to be first and foremost functional before it can start claiming any other virtues. The point being, there are plenty of novels relevant to the ‘real Ireland’ – there are novels due from Gene Kerrigan, Christy Kenneally, Declan Hughes and Tana French next year – that are being written with an ear for who we are now and where we are going.
  This is not to damn “literary” novels for not engaging with modern Ireland; a little birdie, for example, tells me that Gerard Donovan, for one, is currently at work on ‘a novel of crimes’, while David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, published earlier this year, is a powerful work about the post-Troubles political landscape in Northern Ireland. But why is it that only “literary” novels are accorded sufficient weight and credibility when it comes to recording the authentic experience of what is ‘real’ about the way we live?