A Sporting Chance: Football and Historical Fiction in David Peace’s New Novel, Munichs

WRITTEN BY DOUGLAS KEMP

Despite being the world’s most popular sport, football (soccer) has not been a successful or popular subject for fiction, and has certainly not held much appeal for writers of historical fiction. Other established sports such as cricket or baseball do have a comparatively rich literature. David Peace, an English writer from Yorkshire, has challenged this deficit, and has published among his other works, three novels about British football: The Damned Utd. (which was made into a film) and dealt with the tumultuous 44-day reign of Brian Clough as manager of Leeds United in 1974; Red or Dead, which had the iconic 1960s and 1970s Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly as its subject; and now, Munichs (Faber/WW Norton, 2024), which has as its subject the 1958 disaster at Munich airport with the plane crash carrying the Manchester United squad home after a European Cup match in Belgrade.

David spoke about the appeal of British football culture to him as a writer: “For me, the history of British football plays a great part in the history of the working class, and it is a history that is filled with so many great narratives and characters. And so, for example, I could have written about Herbert Chapman or Stan Cullis or Bill Nicholson or Jock Stein. Like Matt Busby and Jimmy Murphy in Munichs, or Bill Shankly and Brian Clough in Red or Dead and The Damned Utd., these were all men who came from very poor backgrounds, often with little formal education, and, Clough aside, who also served in the War or a reserved occupation, but who succeeded in football not only through their physical abilities and strengths, but through the power of their intellect and character. And, most importantly, they would not allow themselves to be constrained by the strictures of the class and time into which they were born. So, for me, these men are not only fascinating and complex characters, but inspiring ones, too.”

Academic discourse has analysed at some length why football has been neglected by the arts and literature despite its central role in society. For David, the reason is quite straightforward: “for most of the twentieth century, football was a working-class pursuit, and there persists, even to this day, a belief in publishing and the wider media that working class men don’t read books. Or, if they do, certainly not novels.”

The Munich disaster and the aftermath is still emotionally raw for many, particularly supporters of Manchester United, and even though the main participants have now died, David spoke about what he wanted to achieve in a work of historical fiction and how he approached the subject. “My overriding preoccupation is always to get the historical record and context as correct and as accurate as I can, in order then to try to take the reader back to that time and place and to make the events of the novel a ‘lived experience’ for the reader. This is the reason I do what I do. And I don’t believe I need to invent characters in order to do that and, furthermore, such characters would then distort or even destroy the accuracy of what I am trying to do. In the case of Munichs, distorting or perverting the historical record and context would also be insulting and disrespectful to the Dead and to the Survivors, and their families, and all those who were affected by the disaster and which is the very opposite of what I am trying to achieve in writing this novel. Manchester United supporters need no reminding of the terrible event of February 6, 1958, but I hope the novel helps re-establish the Munich Air Disaster as a national tragedy, and one that affected millions of people, regardless of who you supported, where you were from, or whether you were even interested in football or not.”

David Peace’s football novels are not structured as conventional narratives – there is much interior monologue from the characters, and his prose can have an incantatory, almost mesmeric rhythm, reflecting the often-repetitive nature of our thoughts and actions. There are some dialects employed in the text of Munichs, and David explained that he “very much wanted Munichs to be a polyphonic novel, again to reflect the extent of the tragedy, and so it was very important then to have a multitude of different and distinct voices within the text. The particular challenge was how to then do that while retaining an overall third-person narrative point of view. However, a great inspiration and help here came from Gogol and his use of the ‘skaz’ narrator, from the Russian ‘skazat’, meaning ‘to tell’ which, in short, is a third-person narrative voice that takes on the persona of the character the narrator is talking about.

“Having found that form, the biggest challenge was then to try to get the voices as accurate to both the place and the time as I could, and that involved a lot of listening and reading of other texts – books, films and music – from the period. Even then, the section set in Dublin was especially daunting, and so I was lucky to have a friend in Andrew Fitzsimons, a wonderfully gifted poet and academic, who kindly read an early draft and made some very, very wise and helpful suggestions.”

After three novels about football, David said that “there are other football subjects that do appeal, though having been burnt over my plans for a Boycott book, I’ll keep my big mouth shut for now, at least.” This refers to a publicised planned novel about the Yorkshire cricket player Geoffrey Boycott who then, with the assistance of a professional writer, drafted his own story that owed much to David Peace’s identifiable fictional style.  As a supporter of Leicester City, I would be fascinated to discover what David could make of that miraculous and still-hardly believable Premier League win in 2015-16. He agreed that “it really is one of the greatest footballing stories there is and one, moreover, that continues to give hope to that vast majority of football supporters who don’t follow the ‘Big Six’: but who continue to dream, in my case that Huddersfield Town are but four seasons from Europe!”

About the contributor: Douglas Kemp was an HNR reviews editor from 2008 to 2024.

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 110 (November 2024)