Critical Mass

Cadence of prose is a prized respite

David Peace is the author of Red or Dead.
David Peace is the author of Red or Dead.

One of the chief lures of reading is the little coma it can sometimes produce; an uncoupling of the reader from present concerns. A good book can make you forget not only yourself, but your experience and prejudice. A great book can deliver you unto a new world.

David Peace's Red or Dead (Melville House, $30) is a great book that might not seem to have much to offer most Americans. It is fiction, but as far as I can tell it faithfully recounts the story of Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who, from 1959 until 1974, was the manager -- head coach -- of the Liverpool Football Club in England's Premier League. Liverpool was a second-division team before he arrived, and he drove the team to great glory. During his tenure Liverpool won three First Division championships, two Football Association Challenge Cups, four Charity Shields and one UEFA (Europa League) Cup.

Unless you follow European football -- soccer -- more closely than I do, that last sentence might not do anything more than suggest that Shankly was a good coach. And you might assume Red or Dead is a sports novel; that it's about how Shankly turned Liverpool into a powerhouse; about how he inspired and goaded and willed his team to greatness. But soccer is only a small part of what the book is about, and I would go further than that to say that the legend of Shankly is only a small part of what the book is about.

For, while Shankly probably occupies a somewhat larger place in British pop culture than someone like Vince Lombardi does here (I don't know that he does; when the Guardian reviewed Red or Dead last year, critic Mark Lawson wrote that Shankly was likely to be "obscure to many readers under the age of 40"), the book's power derives not from the story being told but from the compellingly audacious way that Peace tells it.

To prove a point, as much to myself as to you, I've opened the novel to a random page (339). Nearly halfway down the page is this paragraph:

On Saturday 30, January, 1971, Arsenal Football Club came to Anfield, Liverpool. That afternoon, forty-three thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven folk came, too. Arsenal Football Club were second in the First Division. And Liverpool Football Club were eighth in the First Division. But that afternoon, Liverpool Football Club did not struggle against Arsenal Football Club. Clemence did not struggle, Lawler did not struggle, Yeats did not struggle, Smith did not struggle, Lloyd did not struggle, Hughes did not struggle, Boersma did not struggle, McLaughlin did not struggle, Heighway did not struggle, Toshack did not struggle and Hall did not struggle. And in the fourth minute, Ron Yeats passed to Steve Heighway. Heighway raced down the wing, Heighway accelerated down the wing. And Heighway crossed. Brian Hall met the cross, Hall headed the cross. Towards the goal, towards the net. And John Toshack helped the ball. Into the net and into a goal. And in the fiftieth minute, Emlyn Hughes rolled a free kick short to Tommy Smith. And Smith shot. And Smith scored. And Liverpool Football Club beat Arsenal Football Club two-nil. At home, at Anfield. Bill Shankly walked down the touchline. Bill Shankly shook the hand of Bertie Mee. And Bill Shankly smiled --

Peace is working with repetition. Peace is working with rhythm, driving toward a pure form. Peace is daring something, with his simple, declarative sentences devoid of adjectives. He is drumming in your head, beating down expectations and assumptions for more than 700 pages.

Red or Dead is about what they call football in England, and it is also about politics -- the title has a double meaning. But it is mostly about language and the way words echo and rebound and lull. Peace seems to be hammering his words into a dense gray mass, but if you stick with him, they start to hum and glow from within. They become thrilling. The cadences pop in your head like strings of firecrackers, they boom and rattle, rats skittering on a tin roof resolve into meter, into iambic pentameter and octameter -- eight-footed beasts dancing on air.

...

Brian Eno says of ambient music that it must be as "ignorable as it is interesting," and maybe that's a way to think of Red or Dead. You might be able to dismiss it if you don't feel motivated to attune yourself to it, if you don't attend to it. If you don't commit, you might find it boring. But read hard -- listen hard -- and you tap into something thrilling, something to pry you away from your quotidian concerns. Something to make you forget yourself.

Am I making too much of this? Maybe. But in addition to the poetry, Peace also gives us the story of the obsessive, striving Bill Shankly, the Christian and the Socialist, a fair and fantastically narrow man devoted to communal success. Peace gives us his rituals and routines and shows us how thousands of seemingly thankless drills sustain and uplift.

It's easy to see Red or Dead as the antithesis of Peace's Red Riding Quartet -- Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002) -- a fictional account of the search for the Yorkshire Ripper, or his novels about the Japanese serial killer Yoshio Kodaira (2007's Tokyo Year Zero) and the artist and alleged poisoner Hirasawa Sadamichi (2009's Occupied City), who, in 1949, was convicted -- possibly wrongly -- of killing 12 Tokyo bank employees. It's a book about a good man, a bizarrely good man -- a kind of saint, devoid of ego and committed to the happiness of others.

But the book isn't simply about Bill Shankly. Peace also gives us the well-researched minutiae of his games, and the inherent inspiration of the overcoming underdog. In the background, you can feel the nervous buzz malaise of England in the '70s, the days of "no future," donkey jackets and Edward Heath's doomed "quiet revolution." Toward the end, we even catch a glimpse of a rising Margaret Thatcher.

There is a particularly affecting passage late in the book where, after several years of retirement, Bill Shankly is invited to London to award a trophy -- the "Sword of Honour" -- to one of his old players, Kevin Keegan. When he presents the sword to Keegan, Keegan hands it back and insists his old coach keep it. Bill Shankly is much affected.

Later Bill Shankly tells his wife, Nessie, it was forged by the same people, the Wilkinson Sword company, who forged the Sword of Stalingrad, which was presented, with gratitude, to the "steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad" by King George VI after World War II.

Nessie Shankly shook her head. Nessie smiled again. And Nessie tells him, I didn't know that, love. I didn't know any of that ...

I don't think too many people do, said Bill Shankly. And if they ever did, they probably don't remember now. People often forget.

...

I suppose I had heard the name Bill Shankly before I read Red or Dead; after all, I had read Peace's other football novel, The Damned United, which was about Brian Clough's short and tempestuous tenure as manager of Leeds United in 1974. Clough's first game as Leeds' manager was against Liverpool -- Bill Shankly's last game as manager. But now he lives for me in the same way Leopold Bloom and Jay Gatsby live, as an indelible character whose humanity is no less substantial for its being built of black glyphs on cream paper.

The British novelist David Peace's "Red Riding" quartet, which was turned into three films, followed the hunt for a serial killer in Yorkshire. His 2006 novel The Damned Utd, about the Leeds United soccer manager Brian Clough, was turned into a movie starring Michael Sheen.

Red or Dead is an important book arriving at a crucial time. It reminds us of the real and ancient pleasures available to readers, that not everything devolves to narrative and plot, that there is music in unsounded words and something sensual in slipping away into another's mind, another's manufactured dream. In a time when books generally don't, this one has a chance to matter.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 07/13/2014

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