John Braine’s early attempts at writing were “failures from the beginning” because of his “choice of subject” — racing drivers, artists, novelists, and bullfighters. Taking advice from his father to write on subjects he was familiar with, Braine took a “fictional approach” based “solidly on fact” — choosing pubs and local am-drams as the raw material for what would later become his debut breakthrough, Room at the Top. Braine’s classmate in the Angry Young Man movement, Alan Sillitoe, received similar write-on-what-you-know advice from poet Robert Graves, and set his debut, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, in his hometown of Nottingham.

It’s a short and straight line to draw from these mid-century pioneers of provincial realism to the contemporary novels of David Peace whose own style of “faction” — fictionalising real-life events and matters of social history — layers the atmospheric licence of imaginative fiction onto intricate skeletons of historical fact. Firmly establishing himself as the twenty-first century heir to the Angry dynasty, Peace’s fictionalisation of Brian Clough’s 44 days as Leeds United manager, The Damned Utd, was written as a tribute to Braine, Sillitoe and co., with references to famous lines like “don’t let the bastards grind you down” — a favourite of the real-life Brian Clough’s, and one that plays in his fictional portraits mind.

In his latest novel, Munichs, Peace takes as his subject the Munich air disaster of 1958, adding the first fictional account to a large body of nonfiction literature that is credited in the novel’s capacious four-paged bibliography. Peace’s prose is terse yet tender, and what helps prevent this novel from being a mere recitation of events is somewhat ironically the American blood in Peace’s literary DNA. Whilst Peace’s democratic spirit is such that he covers every funeral — including the forgotten co-pilot, club staff and journalists who died in the disaster — repeated plot points are prevented from being laboured by the rhythmic and unpunctuated prose that Peace inherits from American crime author, James Ellroy.

Without punctuation of dialogue tying him down, Peace moves from birds-eye journalistic accounts of sports fixtures, to believable embodiments of Cissie Charlton, mother of Bobby, to Jimmy Murphy, the assistant in the gaffer’s shoes, to Matt Busby and his “babes” recovering in a German hospital, to grieving landladies of young players dead before their prime, all seamlessly mediated by the narrator’s adaptive and homely North country voice (“not Reg, our reg”, “full of life, he was”, “were a Manchester lass, were Carol”).

Jimmy Murphy — the Welsh assistant who shuns the limelight and leads the post-disaster team — is the large, paternal and aching heart of this novel; explosively short-tempered with boardrooms the press and himself — “you stupid fucking so-and-so” — Jimmy is at his best in a field with a ball and a young lad to train. With “dirty jokes” and endless generosity for the Busby babes (a phrase, “that neither Busby nor his babes cared for much themselves”), Jimmy rebuilds Manchester United driven by a dutiful belief that the “Red Devils will rise again” — an idea that swells with religious importance in the novel. At home, however, Jimmy’s brought to his knees, curling on the floor clutching rosary beads and weeping in front of his son into the early hours of the morning. Why not me, he asks.

Jimmy is an imperfect man with his human flaws laid bare. But this is a novel where imperfection and humanity are celebrated insofar as loyalties are expressed and maintained. At his funeral, Roger Byrne is remembered for being a “cocky little twat” but his team “were his life”. On the other hand, both Mark Jones and David Pegg were “unchanged” by “honours” and “fame”; and even the brilliant Tommy Taylor, “the big new star, in all the papers,” would “play in borrowed boots at school.”

Whilst the crash is the literal ashes from which a broken and unprepared United team emerge, Peace paints a sympathetic (albeit not uncritical) portrait of the supposed prime movers involved — including the scapegoated pilot harangued by a kangaroo court of aviation authorities, Jim Thain, a regretful Matt Busby who needn’t have taken so many of his young squad abroad, and a struggling Jimmy who wrestles with his own guilt for being absent on the ill-fated flight.

Blame in such a tragedy is frivolous, and Peace scatters it in the wind and does not let it rest at any one character’s feet. Instead, it is impersonal market forces — in the form of prying journalists penetrating private grief — which are the villain of this story rooted in a working-class politics of community and belonging. 

Giving credence to Marx’s claim that under capitalism “all that is holy is profaned,” voyeuristic journalists afford no dignity to grieving families, recovering players nor the Dead (always capitalised). A “horde” of photographers “swarm” around the hospital bed of Matt Busby and “blind” the “injured man with their sudden bright white flashes in his eyes as he fought for his life.”  In their “trench coats” they “lean against” trees and snap at funerals whilst “relatives and friends” rise to their feet. Under imperatives of maximising returns without constraint, dignity is an impediment to financial self-interest, and tragedy is reduced to mere news-story cannon fodder until the headlines grow hungry and eventually move on, “even in Manchester.”

Peace imagines Manchester United, on the other hand, as more than just turnstiles and t-shirts — the club is a distinctive institution within a working-class civic ecology, firmly rooted in a place and proudly bearing its name. United “always made sure” that “every lad of theirs” had “a trade to fall back on, if things went wrong.” The team draw on a talent pool of local lads who have fathers down the pits, share digs close to the ground, stop for cups of tea with their trainers’ families and prioritise their emotional attachments over unrooted ambitions. 

Romantically, Peace dwells on footballs’ religious form: as something to “hold on to, after the storm”; as a medium for collective redemption (“Limbs and hearts may be broken, but the spirit remains”); as a project of self-sacrifice for team and fans; and finally a “place of exercise” that becomes a “chapel of rest, a place of pilgrimage, of tribute,” as the coffins of the Dead are bought from Munich to the Old Trafford ground. 

… if nostalgia comes from nostos, meaning homecoming, then implicit in Peace’s account is how far from home we’ve come

Delivered in mesmeric repetitions (“the horror of yesterday, the terror of tomorrow, the ghosts of yesterday, the game tomorrow”), Peace sustains a post-traumatic atmosphere of grief anger and hope that he keeps alive for nearly five hundred pages, circling around the same themes of triumph over tragedy, of the power of camaraderie, of the importance of local loyalties, and of a club rooted in its industrial and sectarian character. It’s an achievement of masterful storytelling that simply listing local details can make for a heartbreaking read. 

Peace’s triumph of localism could give rise to criticisms of parochial sentimentality and nostalgia. But if nostalgia comes from nostos, meaning homecoming, then implicit in Peace’s account is how far from home we’ve come; with clubs depleted of their character and traditions in all but name, and of the local working-class game degenerated into a homogeneous competition between global corporations drawing from the same talent pool. 

This heartfelt sporting novel is evocative of a lost time and the period detail is on the ball; reading Munichs feels like a mournful rally against the plundering and loss of our civic inheritance — both on and off the pitch.