This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It’s sometimes said that the difference between a short story and a novel is that a story contains a moment — often a moment of change for the protagonist — whilst a novel has a broader sweep. Certainly stories which try to do more can feel cramped and airless (allowing exceptions for genius, such as Borges), and novels that restrict themselves to a single moment tend to try the reader’s patience by shrinking to internal inaction.

A novel can, however, capture a moment of change for a society, and that is what the three novels in this month’s column seek to achieve, with great success.

David Peace is one of the most distinctive, and distinguished, British novelists now writing. His work blends interest in the fabric of society — the Yorkshire Ripper and police corruption in the Red Riding quartet, the miners’ strike in GB84 — with an idiosyncratic style, driven by repetition and structural tics, which is at once obsessive and mesmerising.

His last novel Tokyo Redux was one of this column’s best novels of the year in 2021, but it’s for his novels about English football teams that Peace has become best known. His 2006 novel The Damned Utd, about Brian Clough’s disastrous Truss-length period at the helm of Leeds United in 1974, has sold 200,000 copies. He followed that with a punishingly meticulous 700-page account of Bill Shankly’s life (and afterlife) as Liverpool manager.

The title of his new novel, Munichs, should tell anyone with even a passing awareness of English football history (I just about reach that level) that this time the team is Manchester United and the setting is February 1958. That was when United lost eight of its players, along with staff and accompanying journalists, when their plane crashed whilst attempting to take off from Munich Airport in snowy conditions. It’s an event which looms large in the club’s history — when I took my United-loving son to see them play in February 2018, the 60th anniversary of the disaster, each fan was presented with a commemorative book, programme and pin badge.

Peace wants to make the point that this was not just a tragedy for Manchester United and its fans, but wider than that: it was a disaster for English football. No, wider than that, too: it was a tragedy for working class culture. He does this by making Munichs — the plural significant — a polyphonic novel, where voices of players, families, coaches, media and others all blend into a choral narrative.

The book covers the period from the disaster to the FA Cup final a few months later, as United attempted to rebuild its team: a team that had just begun to flourish under legendary manager Matt Busby and his young, dynamic team of “Busby babes”.

It is a multi-voice novel in another way too: Peace covers the gamut of emotions. There is emotional wreckage, as when Dick Colman, father of crash victim Eddie Colman, is found by police standing in the rain in the middle of the night and tells them, “I’m just looking for my son, is all. It’s late and I’m worried that he’s lost.” There is the cynicism of rival fans, who thought, “Good. Not good they’re dead, them lads, not that, but good they’ve had a setback, a bit of a setback, if you like.”

There is even comedy, when player Ray Wood, one of the survivors, struggles to successfully take his pills from the nurse’s hand when in hospital: “What the hell’s wrong with me? I’m seeing double here. I’m a bloody keeper, I can’t be seeing bloody double.”

This is a book about another time, a time when top-league footballers were part of their communities, when money had not yet suffocated the game, when a team could have not one but two players called “Nobby”. Emotions are typically stilted (Bobby Charlton “never mentioned the subject of Munich ever again”) but the scale and shock of the tragedy — so many funerals, so many men wondering “why them and not me?” — and Peace’s handling of that material, make this one of the most powerfully moving novels I’ve read.

Peace, who as always effaces himself from the book but is everywhere present, adopts a careful refusal of literary language to match the characters, using repetitive phrases — “Jimmy shook, wrenched and wretched, Jimmy sobbed, he cried” — to create a hypnotic effect.

When player Ernie Taylor wants to leave the club, get away “from all the memories, like”, substitute manager Jimmy Murphy tells him, “Some of our young lads here, the ones we’ve left, they’re hardly more than boys, Ernie, just young boys, and so I have to show them that we can go on, that we don’t give in to grief, and so I need you, Ernie, need you to help me show them that we can go on, that life, this bloody life, it does go fucking on.” Ernie, in response, “wiped one eye, then the other”, and so did the reader.

A point of social change is also the background to — and in many ways the story of — Lissa Evans’ seventh novel Small Bomb at Dimperley. It takes some skill to use a title like this, which — with its echo of the famous 1930s Times headline “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead” — sets out its tragicomic vision of the world before the reader even hits the first page. The setting is postwar England, and the 16th century estate of Dimplerley, home to the Vere-Thissetts, led by the redoubtable Lady Irene.

Evans has a knack of dispatching information about the characters without rubbing the reader’s nose in it, and so we learn about the family members: gilded son Felix, his widow Barbara, Pollux the dog, other son Ceddy — disabled since childhood — and the other other son Valentine, who following Felix’s death, is now Sir Valentine, and has acquired several layers of responsibility — but, following an encounter with “a very large hammer”, has also lost his fingertips.

As well as family there are supporting characters, like Zena who was evacuated to Dimperley as a child, and now works as secretary to elderly uncle Alaric. She has a daughter, Allison, whose father Chris is returning from Malta with some surprising news. But the machinations are less important than the lines and the themes. Dimperley is in trouble: it may need to be acquired by the National Trust if it is to survive, and in the meantime, the world is changing around it.

The general election of 1945 has “filled Parliament with baying reds”, it’s difficult to get domestic staff — even when you promise the availability of an electric vacuum sweeper — and the old retainer, McHugh, “had died, suddenly and inconveniently (one might almost say inconsiderately), actually during the Baronet’s funeral”.

All in all, “something vital” has changed, as Lady Irene sees it, “like a sprung door that would never again close properly”. Where all this will lead would be telling, though there is indeed a small bomb (“very exciting,” says Alaric), which is dwarfed by the large bomb of social change that upends the nation.

Even passing characters shine, such as B.M. Rhydderch-Jones, the National Trust assessor whose waspish snobbery (a child is dismissed on the basis that she “ate her meal entirely with a fork”) is inspired by the famous diaries of James Lees-Milne. Evans was a television comedy producer before becoming a novelist, and her gift for comic language and timing is evident everywhere in this joyful book.

One great social change facing us now is the advent of artificial intelligence. It’s a running joke amongst followers of the topic that artificial general intelligence is always described as being 30 years away. Sure enough, it’s the topic of The Singularity, one of the lesser-known novels by the great Italian writer Dino Buzzati.

Published in 1960 and set in the wild future of 1972, the novel opens in familiar style: an academic, Ismani, is summoned by the Ministry of Defence to relocate for a secret project in a mountainous military zone. “If we succeed here, we will become masters of the world!” he’s told.

At first the narrative is driven by Ismani’s struggles to work out what exactly the project is — nobody else seems to know either — and the reader wonders if this will be, like Buzzati’s best-known novel The Tartar Steppe, a mystery deliberately devoid of resolution.

But, no — we encounter a strange array of boxes lining a valley, at once mechanical and alive, and we learn that this structure is an artificial representation of a woman. And not just any woman, but the deceased lover of the chief engineer, Endriade. To say more would release a flurry of spoilers, but it touches on that thorny contemporary issue of the threat from AI whilst delivering an emotionally turbulent story.

I might even go further and say that The Singularity is the most interesting representation of the unknowability of non-human intelligence I’ve read since Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. My only quibble is the title chosen for this new translation, which seems to point too desperately at contemporaneity — I prefer the previous English title, “Larger than Life”, or even better, the original Italian, which translates as “The Great Portrait”. But we have to settle on something, I suppose. After all, as the book reminds us, “language is the worst enemy of mental clarity”.