David Peace: ‘The Munich air crash was a national tragedy. But it’s also a positive story of how people overcame that tragedy’

For a writer known for his uncompromising approach to difficult subjects – violent crime, mental breakdown, social conflict – David Peace gets more nervous than you might expect. His new book, Munichs, has a photograph of the great English footballer Bobby Charlton on the cover. The book was finished before Charlton died, says Peace. “But I was wary of having him on the cover so soon after he died. My editor was quite sure it was tasteful.”
He’s nervous too about including an homage to James Joyce in the novel – but we’ll come to that. The photograph of Charlton shows him kicking a ball with local kids in his hometown of Ashington, in northern England, as he recovered from the Munich air crash. The disaster and its aftermath are the subject of Peace’s novel – how, on February 6th, 1958, a plane carrying Manchester United players, staff and journalists crashed as it attempted to take off from Munich airport, killing 23 people.
Why did Peace, who has lived in Tokyo since 1994, want to write about Munich? “It’s really all connected to my father,” he says. (The book is dedicated to his memory.) “We’d had this ongoing conversation for many years, about writing a book about Bobby Charlton. I had this idea that it might be the third football book [after Peace’s earlier novels The Damned Utd, about Brian Clough’s chaotic tenure as Leeds United manager, and Red or Dead, about the Liverpool boss Bill Shankly].
“Despite the fact that my dad was a Huddersfield Town supporter [as is Peace], the players he talked about most were the Busby Babes,” he says, referring to the team of young players that the Manchester United manager Matt Busby put together in the 1950s, several of whom were killed at Munich. “My dad was 16 or 17 [when he saw them play] and was just immediately blown away by how great the team were. It was an ongoing conversation we had; we would speak on Skype once or twice a week. And after he died I came back to Tokyo. I was supposed to pick up this book I’d been writing for 20 years, called UK-DK, and I couldn’t pick it up. I think writing Munichs was a way to keep that conversation going.”
Peace himself was not a sporty child. “My father played football and cricket. Sport was what he was interested in. And I would go to football with my dad, but I just wanted to write and draw. Then I wanted to be in a band. I had no sporting ability whatsoever. I think possibly I’ve written these sporting books as a way to get my father’s approval, having failed to get into any sporting team,” he says, laughing.
Peace’s interest in writing about sport is just one branch of his work. He has written too about violent crime, in his Red Riding quartet, about UK social history in GB84 (about the miners’ strike) and about Japan in his Tokyo trilogy. Among his fans, the aforementioned unfinished novel UK-DK (“UK Decay”), about Britain in the 1970s under Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, has achieved legendary status. The style of Peace’s writing is distinctive, characterised often by repetition and patterning, drawing the reader into an almost hypnotic state where we begin to think we’re not so much reading about the events described as personally remembering them.
Munichs has an impressive bibliography: Peace cites 65 books as sources. With a novel like this, how do you know when to stop researching and start writing and imagining? “It’s a really good question. I set myself a [boundary] – I knew I didn’t want to go past the cup final in May 1958. And I tried not to write with any kind of hindsight, so that the characters are in the moment. And I’m trying to put the reader back in that moment.”
Reading Munichs shows how Peace has achieved his aim. Although we know the outcome, it was still moving to read of Bobby Charlton’s first casual kickabout after he’d sworn to give up soccer following the crash. And the death of Duncan Edwards, though again well known, left me with a feeling of nausea, so powerfully is it delivered on the page. Did this affect Peace emotionally too?
“It did. And you can say this and it sounds dramatic, but at the end of the week I would go back and read what I’d written aloud on my own in the office. And even though I’d written it myself the day before, I would surprise myself. I knew Duncan didn’t make it, but it was almost a shock to me personally when he didn’t.”
Munich “was a national tragedy. And it’s also an important part of working-class history. It’s a tragedy but it’s also, to me, a positive story of how people overcame that tragedy. I think there’s an absence of these stories, and it was important for my dad, for me, but [important] that it was published as well.”
Given the significance of the subject, how important to Peace is strict fidelity to the facts? “All my books bar [his debut] 1974 have been based on things that really happened. I would never write something in the book that I knew not to be true. But, having said that, [in the book] Nobby Stiles sees the ghost of Eddie Colman dancing under the stands. So I would argue that those things are emotionally true if not literally true.”
Munichs may be the story of a famous tragedy, but there is a remarkable range of registers in the book, including comedy. In one scene – which really happened – United are so desperate to rebuild their team after Munich that they sign a new player, Stan Crowther, just an hour before their FA Cup fixture. “Well, I just hope we can get to the ground in time,” Stan says, sighing. “Oh don’t you worry about that, son,” replies the temporary manager Jimmy Murphy, “I’ve arranged a police escort for us.”
Is it important to have humour in a book like this? “I think it was important for me to do it in this book. In the midst of this great tragedy there are these minor comedies playing out. I really felt that Munich is Munichs: it’s something that affected many different people in many different ways. And I thought it was very important that this be a polyphonic novel.” And it is, incorporating the experiences of players, managers, family members and more.
Indeed, one vision for Munichs included an even wider social approach. “I thought there was possibly a way to tell a longer story of Manchester United as a novel of tales that would go from Munich to winning the European Cup [in 1968, a decade later]. The model I was looking at was Dubliners, and United would be the thing that binds the stories together. But I never got beyond the Munich story.”
Speaking of Dubliners, a line from The Dead, Joyce’s final story in the collection, provides the epigraph, and there’s an homage to the famous last lines of that story – the snow falling – in the book. Peace shows the snow in Munich “falling softly on the ruins of the house at the end of the runway, softly falling on the wreckage of the plane … falling, too, upon the mortuary where the bodies of the dead, the twenty dead, lay waiting, wanting to go home.”
“That’s one of the things I was quite nervous about,” he says. “Like a great many people, I would argue that The Dead is the finest short story written. But it has also inspired countless terrible things, and I didn’t want to add to [that]. When I sent the book to [his publisher] Faber, I was expecting them to say, ‘Yeah, it’s okay, but take that bit out.’ But it was important to me: it was an emotional connection.”
What is the best part of being a writer? “I just feel tremendously lucky to be able to do it. It took me 14 years of writing and being rejected – ‘Don’t send us anything again’-type rejections. The core thing is just the act of being in the room and writing. The happiest moments are when it just feels like I’m taking dictation. The voices are just coming and it’s: Can I write it down quick enough?”
He likes meeting readers too (and will be in Ireland in October to promote Munichs). Given the reputation of his writing – particularly the early novels – for featuring gruesome content, this can lead to certain expectations among readers. “When [his second novel] 1977 was published, I did an event in London with Iain Sinclair. But the night before, I’d been with a friend of mine, we’d had a few drinks, and he managed to be sick all down what I was wearing. So I spent all night sponging down this black suit, and hadn’t slept at all, and [at the event] this guy came up to me, I was covered in vomit stains, and he said, ‘You’re exactly like how I imagined you’d be!’”
Given Peace’s interest in British politics and society, is he happy to see a Labour government? He pauses for a long time. “Of course,” he says eventually. “I mean … I’m an unreformed Corbynista. But I’d rather have a Labour government than the last 14 years. Whatever my many issues with Keir Starmer and the present Labour government, I’d rather it was them than the Conservatives any day of the week.”
And does the completion of a third book on football – a sort of loose triptych – mean that Peace has finished with the subject? “No,” he says immediately. “It’s such a huge part of working-class history. It has so many rich characters and so many great stories. It’s a novelist’s gold mine, really. So I very much doubt I’m done with football.” Watch this space, then – even if some of us are hoping that we get to read the long-awaited UK-DK first.
Munichs, by David Peace, is published by Faber & Faber on August 27th