The last time David Peace wrote a novel about football he got his publishers sued for libel, which may help explain why his new one avoids invention wherever it
can squeeze interest out of such stony matters of record as team sheets and attendance figures.
Red or Dead follows the legendary manager Bill Shankly from his arrival at
Liverpool — second-division stragglers in 1959 — to his death in 1981, seven years after retirement, having built a league-winning team that went on to rule Europe. Seldom does a novel, dedicated at such length to a single life, venture so scarcely into the mind of its subject; the gamble is that Peace’s biblically iterative method is strong enough to sustain but not overwhelm you.
All the novel’s effects depend on repetition. Here Peace uses a mere number to evoke match-night majesty:
On Thursday 14 April, 1966, Liverpool Football Club travelled to Parkhead, Glasgow. That night, seventy-six thousand, four hundred and forty-six folk came too. Seventy-six thousand, four hundred and forty-six folk to watch the leaders of the Scottish First Division play the leaders of the English First Division in the first leg of the semi-final of the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Seventy-six thousand, four hundred and forty-six folk to watch the Celtic Football Club versus Liverpool Football Club. At Parkhead, in Glasgow. Seventy-six thousand, four hundred and forty-six folk in full voice, in full cry.
And here he portrays the aftermath of defeat chez Shankly without access to what he’s actually thinking:
In the house, in their kitchen. Bill got up from the table. Bill picked up the plates. Bill walked over to the sink. Bill put the plates in the sink. Bill walked back over to the kitchen table. Bill picked up the salt and pepper pots.
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