David Peace, Novelist

Just ordered the Quartet on Amazon. Am gonna try to read 'em quickly, though "The Rest is Noise" is still on the go after six months so we'll see.

― Enrique (Raw Patrick), Friday, 9 January 2009 11:52 (1 week ago) Bookmark

I finished the lot in a week. Feel kinda weird now.

Am starting GB84 tomorrow.

Dude could do with a new author photo though. The current one looks a bit A A Gill.

Tokyo Year Zero is really good but typically bewildering towards the end

Understating wildly.

The other D. Peace thread gets at his sometimes confusing endings. It has spoilers though, don't look if you haven't read the books:

David Peace

The quartet are being sold for £4 each on amazon, so I got them and a book about Stalin for £20, bargain. I've wanted to read Peace since I saw a documentary about him a good few years ago (was really taken with the idea him researching Yorkshire in a Tokyo library) but never got round to it.

i read 1974 last night in one insomniac sitting. Thought it was excellent and quite unrelentingly violent and grim and can't help but think the TV adaptation is going to pull a few punches and ruin it. Going to start on 1977 after I do a bit of hoovering and make some bolognese.

Peace writing in Observer Sport Mag yesterday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/feb/01/rio-ferdinand-world-club-championship

im reassured that rebecca hall is in the tv show.

Before xmas when I was back in Newcastle they had cheap copies of Tokyo: Year Zero everywhere but now I'm back in London I haven't seen one anywhere.

finished the quartet today, definitely going to check some of his other books soon. Although the style did get sort of start sliding in to self-parody after a while through the sheer repetition of, well, repetition.

x and y
y and x
x
y
and
x
and
y

I was kinda surprised how many song lyrics he worked into the quartet, not as direct quotes but assimilated into the prose. I like how dude reps for early-80s anarcho-punk too.

What happens to the journalist, Eddie, out of the first book? We never find out right, or am I being dense?

I don't think we ever find out. But as I read the books in 3 or 4 hour spells in the early hours of the morning and some of it is a bit oblique I may be being dense.

I'm pretty sure we're never told but I fucking raced through them all four in a week so I thought maybe it was in a single sentence that I never caught somewhere.

I keep seeing people and thinking Bad Fucking Bowie.

can lend you T:YZ if you promise not to abscond to Sheff with it etc

I like that the antagonist journalist in the first book just acts like a cunt to Eddie the whole time, but then becomes the protagonist in the second book and is clearly obsessed with and horrified by whatever happened to him

the books have reconfirmed and strengthened my impression, gleaned from one night spent there, that Leeds is a fucking hellhole.

the first time I ever visited Leeds, within two minutes of leaving the train station an unkempt man drinking white lightning threatened to kill me and another member of this forum for being gays who spread AIDS

i was in a taxi and the driver said we shouldn't go where we were going because there were going to be darkies there. Then two junkies were in the street in front of us and one of them swung a punch at the other causing him to fall in front of the taxi which swerved last minute to avoid running him over and nearly crashed us in to a lightpost. He then dropped us off outside two pubs, one of which he said he really liked and frequented and which was called "the queens's something or other" and had a large Union Jack outside it. So we went to the other pub. This was called the Pointer Bar and on a Friday night had a clientele of, excluding our group, four, all old, all Irish. We put the Irish rebel songs on the jukebox and played pool with them.

Nothing else bad happened but Chapeltown is a dump of truly Glaswegian proportions. I was impressed (in a bad way).

When I went to Leeds I saw Darren Hayman. It weren't that terrifying.

The switchover of characters between the books is really well done.

I'll grab T:Y0 sometime MPx4A.

DP really put me off Leeds. It was OK when I visited in 2002 but I don't think I'd feel happy going back now.

'Leeds' is an unusually horrible name for a town or city

Leeds United are an unusually horrible football club

in a sense, Leeds could be the worst place in Britain.

yes, in a sense, a very strange sense were we judge the merits of a place on its football club, how its name sounds and its portrayals in crime fiction.

I like Leeds. Good sushi there!

The names of the coppers in the 4tet are VERY similar to those that actually worked on the case considering what he has them do.

TV adaptation is brilliant.

how much does it pull punches. i mean, first two books have protagonists anal raping.

Leeds can't be worse than E16. ^That Observer article^ is very amusing

nah it probably isn't. Read numerous reports that call parts of London and parts of Glasgow the most deprived areas in Britain and I can believe it.

When is the TV adaption broadcast?

Tokyo Year Zero was really the last straw. Peace's style is so irritating. That book could have been like four pages long. And yes, ha ha, I know it's about repetition. But there's good repetition and then there's charmless, dull repetition.

It's been a while since I've read the books so can't recall specifics (there's no anal rape [who does that to who?], unless it is alluded to so subtly I missed it, which wouldn't be impossible), but it really captures the spirit of bleakness, misery and corruption, even the repetition (?! - xpost) of Peace's style. It couldn't be much darker without becoming completely unwatchable - ie, it's the right side of Catherine Breillat.

And Sean Bean is great.

Only seen the first mind, so it could go downhill.

anal rape: Eddie Dunford to Paula what's her face in the first one (tells her he loves her and is then having sex with her, then forces anal sex on her).

the cop Bob Fraser to a prostitute when he's looking for Janice after she disappears in the second one.

Damned Utd could have done with an anal rape scene.

lol

I thought he alluded to a pretty close working relationship between Clough and Taylor ...

I've now lived in Leeds for about four and a half years and I think it is delightful so nyer.

the first time I ever visited Leeds, within two minutes of leaving the train station an unkempt man drinking white lightning threatened to kill me and another member of this forum for being gays who spread AIDS

a) it was at least 15 minutes

b) it was in a can, so I think it was either Carlsberg or Strongbow

Read the first two of the quartet one recent weekend while I was ill. Not necessary the Norman Cousins choice of sickbed reading material, but there was some kind of weird synergy between my illness and the seedy atmosphere. Now that I've recovered I'm afraid to read the third one lest I fall ill again.

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

I did this. It reads very well.

caveat - I do know what the sport of football is, have dimly heard of Brian Clough (but would have been able to tell you nothing about him before picking up the book), and remember people in school hating Leeds United back in the 1970s.

The trailer for the film makes it look a bit suckass.

I think Peace should stick to football novels, actually.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/22/fiction-david-peace-the-damned-utd

Red Riding on Four tonight!

K-Punk compares it to, err, post-punk.

"attain an expressionist naturalism that exceeds practically anything British cinema has achieved in the past 30 years"

the fuck does "expressionist naturalism" mean?

final par pretty much encapsulates state-of-play chez k-punk/other theoryheadz. such-and-such is good because it doesn't do x, y, and z; in this case provide closure or catharsis or whatever. which may be true, but perhaps one needs to explain all over again why these things are bad before saying that avoiding them is a virtue in itself.

this is going to be great. psyched!

i absolutely love Andrew Garfield. i'd watch any old shite if he was in it and, in fact, i have: i watched "Lions For Lambs" two nights ago.

that last line is a serious cringe. "it's like a piece of post punk music, AND I LOVE THAT I DO"

"it's like a piece of CHOCOLATE"

"it's almost like a good tv programme which I feel is good"

also psyched

love me some andrew garfield too