David Peace, Novelist

weird, david peace had a poem in the guardian earlier but now i can't find it.

saw the rest of the trilogy 1980 was good. 1983 was shite.

A Prediction for the Year 2009

One fine and awful day, thirty years too late, in a full and empty Abbey, to a society that is no society, a great and stupid man, he says:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out her coffin, let the mourners come -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message She is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

She was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song:
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

Now suddenly, as if by magick, the doors of the Abbey swing open wide and a corpse down the aisle he strides, followed by another, and another, and another; the great British people resurrected, they shout:

Start all the clocks, re-nationalize the phones,
Give back to us dogs our juicy bones,
Strike the piano and bang the drum
Scatter her bones and let the morning come -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

Let yer aeroplanes circle cheering overhead
Scribbling on the sky their message She is Dead,
But there'll be crepe nooses round the necks of all you leaders,
For our gloves are off and so now you will heed us -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

For WE are your North, your South, your East and West,
A once working week for your Sunday rest,
Your noon, your midnight, your talk, your song:
You thought hate would last for ever: you were wrong -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

And the stars are here now, but they are every one,
So stop all this mooning and bring back the sun,
Pour away our tears and mop up our blood;
For nothing now can ever stop The Good -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead,
Maggie! Dead! Maggie! Dead!
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie - she is dead, dead, dead.

'shite' is a bit harsh: the lawyer was good.

but for all the hype, and there was a lot of hype, it was not significantly better than (say) that ciaran hinds/kelly reilly thing earlier this year that the prime suspect woman wrote.

been reading '1977' and though the adaptation argument is never-ending and usually tedious, it's fair to say they didn't catch peace's tone in any of these films. up to a point: good, he overdoes it a bit. but i don't think any of the directors 'got it' and went for the pretty safe option of being 'classy'.

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

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Tom D.), Thursday, January 8, 2009 7:07 AM

I fact, I still don't know how to pronounce the guy's name. Today I'm assuming it's "Cluff" in order to rhyme with "enough."

Right. Think of him as the Mark E. Smith of Association Football.

Because of his accent or because of his leadership style?

The latter.

And Peter Taylor is the Brix?

Nah, there's not really an equivalent of Peter Taylor. Craig Scanlon is John McGovern though.

To be honest, not knowing anything about the story made it better it some ways. I couldn't figure out how exactly he was going to get from Derby to Leeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_EHlzd63R8

There is one scene in the book where he tells a story about Frank Sinatra and he says something like "I don't want to namedrop but he met me once, you know."

So, Occupied City is out now. Haven't read it myself, but Mark Sanderson has reviewed it for the Telegraph. I'm guessing this is the first David Peace book he's dipped into:

"Fans of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet will be hugely disappointed[...]What really sinks the novel, though, is the endless repetition. 'I am falling, I am falling, I am falling,/I am falling, I am falling,/I am falling’, bleats a survivor, but the words could equally apply to Peace himself."

The repetition can get wearying, and definitely approaches self-parody at times (the "Guilty feet got no rhythm. Guilty feet got no rhythm." bit in GB84 took me straight out of the book), but at this stage - eight books in - you kinda know what you're getting with Peace. "Endless repetition" is part of the deal, for better or worse.

He does ramp it up a lot in the Tokyo ones to the point where you can't really bring yourself to read over a page of the same phrase repeated just to let it have whatever awesome effect he thinks it'll have on you.

Amazon reviews for Peace's book are frequently funny, like housewives going "I was led to expect some quality crime thriller but this is just an excuse for foul language!!! Disgraceful", like they saw an advert for it on the tube and expected some mildly edgy Patricia Cornwell shit.

There's a long review in the new LRB that has some good points but you need to be a subscriber to see it online.

BAD FUCKING BOWIE

i don't think i like him much, got one and a half books into red riding and gave them away. but whenever i am reminded of him the phrase 'bad fucking bowie' pops into my mind, and i am so pointlessly amused that i can't bring myself to actually dislike david peace

I've only read 1974, is this repetition thing something he developed later on or am I just that oblivious?

In the very beginning of that one there is a kind of repetition when Eddie Dunford is mentallly writing his article about the family's "emotional plea."

I like what MPx4A has to say. I just don't find the repetition particularly well done, let alone effective "voices" for his narrators. I think he actually works best when he's tackling something more mundane and less crimey like Damned Utd. I'd like to see him do a Houellebecq-style novella about a bored computer programmer, rather than read about a detective or other crime-solver or committer who seems impossibly driven on every page to vaguely plow forward through some kind of murky affect and vague illness. It sometimes reads less like a character's mind going in loops than an author kind of ostentatiously talking over his own characters' voices.

Red Riding films will be playing NY Film Fest. First I've heard of em.

I thought this was going to be an RIP Gordon Burn revive.

I just read a Joyce Carol Oates book called Beasts and for a while near the end it turned into a David Peace novel. I starting hearing the phrase "B. F. Bowie" in the back of my head. It was really kind of chilling to think that he had reappeared yet again, this time in college town New England.

Heavy manners coming down
Heavy manners coming down
Heavy country matters coming down

Or something like that.

PROSTITUTE MURDER SQUAD

so red riding is good or what? have a chance to go see a press screening next week and it sounds right up my alley

I found them a massive disappointment in the end, but might have felt differently if I'd never read the books, or if I was a US dude who wanted to see how massively grim Northern England could be in the 70s.

And what a massive cliche "massively grim Northern England in 70s" has become. The 80s were grimmer.

just watched the first one--wayyyy over the top w/ all the "grittiness" signifiers, felt pretty self-parodic at times. the fairly well-trodden storyline was actually a plus since it allowed me to follow the movie despite understanding 60% of the dialogue at best.

even so--camerawork was beautiful and ill watch sean bean in anything

so senile david thomson says it's better than the godfather, because he's a fucking moron, in the NYRB. and now that quote adorns the ads.

the third one was so far beyond bad. in the meantime i've read some peace and wasn't super-impressed by that even, but the films didn't catch his, um, apocalyptic worldview.

it has a great cast (ie rebecca hall) and it looks p good mostly (they overdo it, artiness-wise, as old thomson once would have spotted).

2nd one is by a long shot the best

photography is quite pretty but the scripts are really... eugh

yep. paddy considine is great. the ending is still ridic imho.

xp

i watched them three nights in a row at christmas. was a real slog after the first one tbh.

looked rabishing though, as max says. loved the indian restaurant in particular. felt a lot like my first curry in bradford c.1986, without the shootout, obv.

Crashing disappointment to realise that, despite all the political intrigue and police corruption, it all came down to that old standby, the paedo ring.

Bugger, I should have SPOILER WARNINGed that. Mods feel free to delete.

despite all the political intrigue and police corruption, it all came down to that old standby, the paedo ring.

not mutually exclusive iirc. the bad guys are REALLY BAD.

The fat guy from The Full Monty was the best thing about this.

They should have made it super-trashy really. The endless signifiers of 'quality drama' really did it in. It was static where it should have been squirming.

alan bennett:

13 March. Red Riding is much talked of and applauded, and it is powerful and sometimes hard to watch. Whether it’s feasible or the assumptions about the police entirely plausible I’m inclined to doubt. ‘The Leeds police kick mainly in the teeth’ is the gist of it, plus an assumption that the force in the 1970s was thoroughly corrupt.

Though the circumstances were hardly as lurid, this was very much the assumption when I was a boy. Rationing offered increased opportunities for peculation and my father, a butcher, who was both Conservative and conservative, nevertheless always assumed that most policemen were ‘on the take’ and the magistrates, too. Still, though the police get away with extreme violence and even murder, I find it hard to credit (if I understand the plot) that masked bobbies could shoot up a club or beat up and rape a reporter on the Yorkshire Post without there being some sort of repercussions. Comically, since in my memory the Yorkshire Post was always rather a genteel newspaper, I’d find it easier to believe if the reporter had been from the Yorkshire Evening Post – the newspaper Keith Waterhouse first worked on as a reporter.

So while Red Riding seems like gritty realism it is in this respect quite romantic, as romantic and fanciful as the stories told at the other end of the social and geographical scale in Midsomer Murders. In Midsomer the murders average three or four per episode but never seem to incur any comment in the press or ruffle the calm surface of the community. It takes more than the discovery of a mere body to stop the garden fête. Midsomer and Red Riding are not very different in this and alike, too, in that they’re both, Midsomer particularly, a boon to actors.

I really love Midsomer Murders. The plots are nuts.

raw patrick otm. i think the series was very confused w/r/t quality. maybe people are generally. it's not just about seeing that there are "virtues in pulp", but also that these are different virtues from what you look for in yer proverbial high art. doing pulp-as-art-movie -- im not saying it's never a good idea. but you have to know what you're doing.

xpost

what's the alan bennett thing from? is that the whole thing or an extract?

really wanted to like these but i couldn't make any sense of it at all and was unable to decipher more than a third or so of the dialogue. btu great acting nonetheless and, yes, it looked rabishing.

LRB, they publish extracts from his diaries at xmas and that was one entry.

ok, cheers.

d thomson part of a sinister critics ring - along w/ the editor of sight and sight (whose mrs worked on the series!) and senile old k-punk - to seriously overpraise these progs

[controversial self-edit] yeah basically sight and sound contributor k-punk was presumably sucking up to his editor? idk what's in it for thomson – is he still trading on "being british"? it might be that.

I can reveal as well as being part of an over-praising ring they are also paedos and will kick you in teeth whilst down. They will probably scuttle me for telling you this though.

Occupied City is. . . good (first book of his I've read). Writing sometimes get a bit too much for me. I'd heard nothing about this particular case (the Teigin Bank Murders) before reading it either and wow what an off-the-wall one it is.