Yes, but is it true? That is the second question to be heard in discussions about Red or Dead, David Peace’s new book on Bill Shankly. The first is about whether it is worth anyone’s time ploughing through 700 pages and a quarter of a million words featuring a prodigious amount of repetition and a very limited vocabulary.
A great sports book is often said to “transcend its genre”. With Red or Dead, the reverse is true. Peace’s novel – for that is what he calls it – is a sports book that drills deeper into the quotidian realities of its chosen sport than any non-fiction author would dare to do.
Some suggest that the book’s Proustian proportions would have been significantly reduced, and the reader saved a great deal of time, had its author not felt obliged to base his style on obsessive repetition. But that repetition is the tool with which Peace digs for the truth. It is intended to convey Shankly’s extreme devotion to the endless and scarcely varying routine of life within football.
The book is all action, with virtually nothing in the way of overt descriptive writing, characterisation or digression. Every match in which Shankly managed Liverpool over 15 years is recorded, in language boiled right down to the bone: ”In the 18th minute, Roger Hunt scored. In the 25th minute, Ian St John scored. In the 29th minute, St John scored again…”
A junior reporter on a local weekly newspaper would not get away with such prose but by denying himself even the slightest hint of a literary flourish, Peace draws us closer to the game as Shankly must have seen it – from the inside, rather than as an observer constructing his own romantic narrative. As the chapters go by, he builds a relentless momentum: match to match, season to season, every one different, every one the same.
The style is easily mocked and parodied but if you are prepared to be honest with this book, to be patient, to place yourself in the author’s hands and to read every single one of his quarter of a million words and to register the significance of tiny variations in the incantatory repetitions, then by the time you reach the last 200 pages you will find yourself exactly in the place David Peace wants you do be: inside Bill Shankly’s head, sharing the anxieties of retirement at the age of 60, part of him drained by the demands upon his constitution and his family but the other part wanting it to go on and on, dreading the break from the pitiless routine.
Then you will find the half-dozen pages in which Shankly washes his car and does his garden, repeating the same actions over and over again, trying to fill a silent emptiness, to be an extremely moving depiction of his plight. As Shankly, unwillingly freed from his holy obligation to Liverpool Football Club and their supporters, becomes more reflective, so Peace eases the tension of his prose, until in the last chapters the hammered repetition breaks down, gradually replaced by a spare but distinctly elegiac lyricism.
The author read a couple of passages from the book to an audience at a function in London this week and it was fascinating to hear how his fast-paced, highly rhythmic reading brought out the nuances and the wit. Although humour is not a quality readily associated with Peace’s novels, his rendering of Shankly’s phone conversation with Don Revie the night before a league match at Anfield in 1965 brought the house down.
But is it true? Did that phone call take place? Is that really what Shankly said to Revie? Can we believe anything in a book written by a man who didn’t know Shankly, never saw one of his teams play and has talked to hardly any of the survivors of that Anfield era? He may have undertaken a prodigious amount of research from the printed record, but has he called the result a “novel” simply to evade responsibility for the facts? And if he calls himself a novelist, why didn’t he invent his own football manager?
After the publication of The Damned Utd in 2006, Peace caught a great deal of flak from the family of Brian Clough and from former Leeds players who felt he had distorted the events that took place during Clough’s 44 days at Elland Road. The response surprised him. He had not expected any of them, he said this week, to show an interest. This time he took out insurance by contacting the Shankly family, who offered what he described as their enthusiastic support.
It probably helps that he approached the project with the desire to write a book about “a good man”. Still, he does not avoid the strategic fibbing that formed a part of Shankly’s man-management technique, such as telling his newly appointed successor Bob Paisley, his former assistant, that he had recommended him to the board, when, according to Peace, the thought had never crossed his mind. There are excruciating passages that describe the discarding of veteran players.
Peace has obviously tried to tell the story accurately but as a novelist he commands an array of techniques that encourage him to place the search for emotional truth above scrupulous fidelity to the historical record.
The film director Stephen Frears, who is about to embark on a feature film about Lance Armstrong, told me this week that the slaughtered stag that featured so effectively in The Queen, which he made in 2006, and which won an Oscar for Helen Mirren and a Bafta for the director, was a complete invention.
But it provided a perfect metaphor for the thoughts of the Queen after the death of Princess Diana – and no one complained. “You take your life in your hands,” Frears said of the risks involved in bringing the techniques of fiction, whether in a film or a book, to bear on a real?life subject.
Yes, but what you are actually doing is taking someone else’s life in your hands, as Shakespeare did when he wrote Richard III, creating an image – that of a crook-backed child murderer – which took centuries to dislodge and still lingers in the public mind. “You try to err on the side of fairness,” Frears said. We may argue about the literary merits of Red or Dead – and no doubt minor factual errors will be seized on as critics of Peace’s methods attempt to undermine its authenticity.
Nevertheless, the novelist has done his job. He has given us a Bill Shankly with more dimensions than the good likeness of simple reportage could evoke.