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David Peace's Shankly book

Red_or_Dead

By Red_or_Dead,
in FF - Football Forum

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Gnasher Grand Master

Gnasher

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Who wants a sanitised version?

 

Success comes at a price with sacrifice and caualties. Where you have winners you have losers too.

 

In defence of Peace, in his interview with channel 4 news last night he said the book is not like that. He said that after his book about the miners strike he wanted to write about an uplifting subject for the sake of his kids and you could not get a more uplifting person than shankly.

 

He said he wrote the first half of the book in a fast staccato prose to enhance the shankly quote of football being like a quick paced river which engulfs you and is impossible to resist.

 

It sounded like the author has to much respect for shankly for the book to be a hatchet job. I think it could turn out to be his masterpiece.

 

On a personal note, I've seen the clips they showed of shankly thousands of times and they still bring a lump to the throat.

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GJM Proficient

GJM

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And so Snez. Snez1. He writes his review. Snez1 writes his thoughts. Snez1 writing about a book. Snez. Snez1. Writing. Thoughts. Book. Carefully. He writes his thoughts. Carefully. Snez1 carefully writes his thoughts. Snez1 writes his thoughts carefully. His review. Of a few chapters in. Not many chapters in. Not one chapter in. A few chapters in. Snez1 shares his thoughts. Snez1 shares his thoughts of the first few chapters. The chapters. The first few.

 

David Peace doesn't do Post Quick Reply, but if he did....

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Hermes Grand Master

Hermes

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And so Snez. Snez1. He writes his review. Snez1 writes his thoughts. Snez1 writing about a book. Snez. Snez1. Writing. Thoughts. Book. Carefully. He writes his thoughts. Carefully. Snez1 carefully writes his thoughts. Snez1 writes his thoughts carefully. His review. Of a few chapters in. Not many chapters in. Not one chapter in. A few chapters in. Snez1 shares his thoughts. Snez1 shares his thoughts of the first few chapters. The chapters. The first few.

 

David Peace doesn't do Post Quick Reply, but if he did....

 

Exactly. This is how Shankly thought and spoke.

 

"My idea was to build Liverpool into a bastion of invincibility. Napoleon had that idea. He wanted to conquer the bloody world. I wanted Liverpool to be untouchable. My idea was to build Liverpool up and up until eventually everyone would have to submit and give in.

 

Fire in your belly comes from pride and passion in wearing the red shirt. We don't need to motivate players because each of them is responsible for the performance of the team as a whole. The status of Liverpool's players keeps them motivated. For a player to be good enough to play for Liverpool, he must be prepared to run through a brick wall for me then come out fighting on the other side.

 

The fans here are the greatest in the land. They know the game and they know what they want to see. The people on the Kop make you feel great-yet humble. I'm just one of the people who stands on the Kop. They think the same as I do, and I think the same as they do. It's a kind of marriage of people who like each other.

 

At a football club, there's a holy trinity-the players, the manager and the supporters. directors don't come into it. They are only there to sign the cheques. Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.

 

I was the best manager in Britain because I was never devious or cheated anyone. I'd break my wife's legs if I played against her, but I'd never cheat her.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are. In my time at Anfield we always said we had the best two teams on Merseyside, Liverpool and Liverpool reserves.

 

Above all, I would like to be remembered as a man who was selfless, who strove and worried so that others could share the glory, and who built up a family of people who could hold their heads up high and say 'We're Liverpool'. If you are first you are first. If you are second you are nothing"

 

 

People listened, and were fascinated by what he said. Most will struggle to get past the foreword in Peace's book without being bored to death with his version of Shankly.

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snez1 Mentor

snez1

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And so Snez. Snez1. He writes his review. Snez1 writes his thoughts. Snez1 writing about a book. Snez. Snez1. Writing. Thoughts. Book. Carefully. He writes his thoughts. Carefully. Snez1 carefully writes his thoughts. Snez1 writes his thoughts carefully. His review. Of a few chapters in. Not many chapters in. Not one chapter in. A few chapters in. Snez1 shares his thoughts. Snez1 shares his thoughts of the first few chapters. The chapters. The first few.

 

David Peace doesn't do Post Quick Reply, but if he did....

 

Not far off with that. It really is a lot of repetition.

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Teflon Don Mentor

Teflon Don

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Another favourable review from Mark Lawson in the Guardian:

 

Red or Dead by David Peace – review | Books | The Guardian

 

Bill-Shankly-waves-to-the-010.jpg

 

On 10 August 1974, Leeds United played Liverpool in the Charity Shield, a traditional fixture between the leading sides of the previous season. The match, although officially classified as a "friendly", was notable for an on-pitch brawl between the players Billy Bremner and Kevin Keegan and for a coincidence of managerial changeovers: Brian Clough was leading Leeds out for the first time, while Bill Shankly was walking at the head of the Liverpool side on a final occasion, having retired after turning a previously under-achieving team into the winners of six top-level trophies.

 

Improbably, both managers – and that match – have now featured in separate major novels by the same author. David Peace's The Damned Utd (2006) dramatised Clough's calamitous 44-day spell at Leeds, while Peace's latest novel, Red or Dead, fictionalises Shankly's 15 years at Liverpool.

 

As statistics suggest that the bulk of football supporters are male and the majority of fiction readers female, Peace's keenness to write novels about football suggests an author unusually immune to calculations of marketing and target audiences. Football, though, for Peace is merely part of the story of the subject that has dominated his fiction: the social and political overlords and underworlds of Britain in the 1970s and '80s. Peace's first five published novels – the Red Riding Quartet (1999-2002) and GB 84 (2004) – together devoted around 1,500 pages to the decade between 1974 and 1984, with the search for the Yorkshire Ripper and the miners' strike providing the pivots for an examination of a notably corrupt and paranoid period of public life, during which socialism fell and Thatcherism rose.

 

Although beginning in 1959, Red or Dead is again centrally concerned with the 1970s – Thatcher is elected during the final section – and the book's title, while borrowed from the loyal cry of Liverpool supporters towards their red-shirted team, also has associations with socialism. Shankly, whose centenary falls this September, was a former Scottish miner who – in common with a subsequent great English club manager from the same nation, Manchester United's Sir Alex Ferguson – remained a supporter of the Labour cause throughout his life.

 

And, while Peace has technically moved across the Pennines for this novel, a prominent Yorkshireman, the former prime minister Harold Wilson, is a powerful presence. When approached by Liverpool to become manager, Shankly was in charge of Huddersfield Town, whose supporters have included both Wilson and Peace. In another subsequent overlap, Wilson became the MP for the Huyton area of Liverpool, where his political backers and admirers included Shankly.

 

In two of the novel's stand-out scenes, Shankly and Wilson meet in broadcasting studios. It is a documented fact that, when the recently retired Liverpool manager was offered a chat show on the local station Radio City, he agreed on the basis that his first guest would be the then Labour prime minister. As the book describes, the station's HQ was targeted by protesters against the economic crisis of that time, but the two men had a warm and mutually flattering conversation about parallels between the running of a football club and a government and their shared commitment to socialism, Christianity and the poetry of Robert Burns.

 

In another curious parallel, both men willingly gave up top jobs at a time when nobody expected it, but then struggled to make their lives meaningful. A magnificent later chapter, called "The Religion of My Time", stages a haunting second encounter on a Granada TV afternoon show. Wilson has mysteriously resigned from office (an event that serves as a regular reference point through Peace's books) and survived three brutal operations for cancer. This conversation with Shankly, who has turned up partly because he is so unfulfilled in retirement, turns darkly to questions of unemployment and death. Redundancy, in its various senses, is a recurrent theme of the book. Giants of their time, these great bosses of Liverpool and of Labour will now be obscure to many readers under the age of 40.

 

The transience of reputation is also established by the fact that even fanatical football followers may fail to recognise some of the players who feature in Peace's detailed accounts of almost every game in which Shankly's Liverpool team was involved. As Peace must realise, these capsule match reports ("And, in the last minute of the last match of the season, Hughes shot. And the shot flew across the goalmouth") bravely wager on the patience of even readers friendly to the game.

 

Red or Dead also continues a wider stylistic gamble launched in the writer's earlier books. It is a principle of most teaching and criticism of fiction that prose should contain as much variation of vocabulary, rhythm and reference as possible. For example, a character introduced on one page as "Shankly" would ideally become "he" at the next mention and perhaps "the manager" after that.

 

This rule of elegant variation has generally been ignored by Peace. Here, for instance, is the protagonist of Red or Dead at home with his wife: "Bill got up from his chair. Bill kissed Ness on the cheek. And Bill said, Goodnight, love."

 

Those sentences are typical of the style. Opening the book at random, I find, on page 249, 50 repetitions of "Bill". Certain other formulations echo through the more than 700 pages of Red or Dead. Almost every game at Liverpool's regular ground is noted as being "at home, at Anfield", while Bill is on uncountable occasions to be found at home "in the night and in the silence" and is often consulting there "his book of names, his book of notes".

 

This rhythm of reiteration, which imposes on fiction a tactic more associated with poetry, is also present in the linking prose ("Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were concerned. Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were worried") and even extends to the dialogue. Characteristically, giving his team talk before a game against Manchester United, the manager tells his troops that the opposition boss "is always on the phone to me, asking if any of you are on offer, available for transfer. I know for a fact he'd take any one of you, any one of you, boys. Because they are a makeshift side, this side today. A makeshift United." (Oddly, though, Shankly doesn't double-talk like this in the broadcasting scenes, which are based on recordings.)

 

With earlier books, some furious online reader-reviewers seemed to be under the impression that Peace doesn't realise that he is doing this hypnotic repetition. Clearly, though, it is a calculation and, in Red or Dead, is at its most effective and thematically justified. Shankly was a monomaniac – author of the still-quoted observation that football isn't a matter of life and death, but more important than that – whose training methods relied on drills being endlessly duplicated.

 

Peace's controversial echo-chamber style exactly suggests a mind and a life moving through – and sometimes stuck in – a shallow groove, seeing no other routes. In this context, the nine detailed pages devoted to the retired Shankly carrying out household chores ("Bill held the cloth over the water in the bucket. Bill wrung out the cloth") achieve a perfect mimesis of the condition of an obsessive seeking a replacement fixation.

 

As a devotee of both football and David Peace's novels, I may have been the ideal reader for this book, but hope that many more can be drawn to it. The obvious risk of Red or Dead is that it contains too much football for most fans of hardcore modernist fiction and too much hardcore modernist fiction for most fans of football. It seems unlikely to be grabbed as the monthly choice of book groups even in the Anfield and Huyton areas. Peace, though, again proves himself to be magnificently single-minded and unbiddable, and has recognised in Shankly another brilliant and pioneering obsessive of his profession.

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