David Peace, Novelist

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.

Not strictly relevant but has anyone here read 'Heartland' by Anthony Cartwright? Picked it up on a whim the other day and I'm only about 50 pages in but it's very David Peace - football, declining post-industrial towns, grass roots politics, etc etc.

It seems to be all based around the England-Argentina game in World Cup 2002, very enjoyable so far. Got the feeling it's building up to some very nasty racial tension stuff though.

Okay I've now finished 1/2 the Red Riding Quartet (had to skip 1980 cuz the library didn't have) and am reading 1983 right now. These are undeniably great books. Very much of the LA Quartet, but frankly better written and less repetitive. Having trouble keeping track of what happen in 1974 in 1983 though. Also read Tokyo Year Zero which was good... but I wish like Occupied City it had been a little less dense and exhausting. Setting and the crimes alone makes both of those worth a read.

Curious to read Damned Utd and GB84 although neither seems to have received an American press so I guess I'll have to buy 'em.

watched red riding 1974 a couple weeks ago and thought it was good but nonsensical in a way the novel wasn't i.e. dunford didn't seem to actually discover anything of great importance, it was like an incompetent james bond running around not being very good at his job, and the villains growing bored and kidnapping him in order to have a cathartic showdown and tell him they were the ones he was looking for, leading to big reveals and lots of blood. still good imo. 1980 was a lot better, mainly because the story was more smoothly told and paddy considine was a superior lead character and actor. 1983 coming up next. this shit is so OTT it's ridiculous but i'm "enjoying" it.

GB84 is maybe half way to being a great book... the stream of consciousness ground-level strike action material that's constantly running in the background is fantastic, insighful, atmospheric. The bits about the CEO aren't bad.

The bits about The Jew fall flat because he can't empathise with him enough to make him anything other than a mildly fleshed-out pantomime villain. The neo-Nazi gangster subplot is ridiculous and has no dramatic tension whatsoever for something with such a high body and betrayal count.

I feel like some sort of scabs-eye perspective was missing and it was a big oversight.

I was really disappointed with the series: I lost interest with each episode.

'1983' was pretty good but for some reason the filmmakers decided to not answer 99% of the questions left over from '1980.' oh well.

1974 film is quite ludicrous. As for Andrew Garfield, never send a boy to do a star's job.

GB84. Read it now. Oh, you can't - it's not out for another fortnight.

::hugs own proof copy like a miser::

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:54 (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Erm, I saw it in Waterstone's window this very lunch break...

― ENRQ (Enrique), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:59 (6 years ago) Bookmark

i'm still totally confused by 1983's insistence on not answering any of the leftover questions from 1980 other than 'what's the deal with the creepy priest?' they could have never made 1980 and the two bookend films would have existed just fine without it.

I can't even remember what the leftover questions from 1980 were??!?! The books only made a marginal amount of sense so I guess it's not too surprising that a series that removed one of them altogether would also be a mess.

SPOILERS

- the crew of crooked cops killed paddy considine for discovering their secrets: orchestrating the copycat murder of some girl, murdering everyone who was in the club after andrew garfield killed sean bean, toasting to the north 45 times
- i don't think they ever really addressed why they killed the people in the club, why they killed the girl (though maybe it was to protect sean bean's rep and their own interests?), and while i don't demand that the villains be brought to justice in films, the fact that the third film seemed to completely ignore the events of the second was just bizarre

I don't remember why they kill everyone in the club, but I thought they had to kill the girl because she had seen them kill everyone in the club.

honestly i lost track of a lot of threads; the third film just made it out like there was a cop/rich-dude/asshole northern illuminati behind everything the whole time, rather than different groups like cops or developers or w/e

oh yeah that's right. xpost

din't like the film of 'the damned united'

suspect it's not much like the novel, coz it's so calm

so weirdly it needed to be more peace-like, which i wouldn't usually say

was he trying for a kind of wes anderson look or what, with all these big, simple, stylized compositions? anyway, it never caught fire, it had no feeling for the period, and the music cues were insipid

There's not enough bitterness, fury or brooding resentment in Michael Sheen's Clough. Not by a long shot.

I thought the film was mostly fine in its own right but seemed to have very little to do with Peace

as if Notting Hill was supposed to be an adaptation of Amis!

I thought the film Clough just didn't seem strong enough, at some level - he seemed thin, weak, feeble, brittle, in a way that I don't think the real Clough did (but then my sense of Clough is 1980s / 90s, when he was physically bigger etc, which may explain it a bit)

At home, at Anfield.

Another football manager book huh.

At least now I finally know who one of the people mentioned in "Dig It" is.

Don't worry, when he does stuff like this, it is "occult history" not mere fiction. Again.

I'd like to read this new one. Anything to do with shankly,busby, or stein is interesting to me, and I enjoy peace's pop-beckett quite a bit. looks like it'll be quite the slog admittedly. 700 odd pages of repetition and

Pages,
700 odd of fucking pages
Religious pages.
700 of them.
Page
Page
Page
700 pages
pages
pages
pages

Repetitious. Damn you autocorrect.

Jim Smith next.

Someone on my facebook was ripping into Peace for the repetition and it immediately made me go back to the Red Riding books and enjoy them more

It's very rare for that intense, slashing repetition to translate into a book you can actually read

About 50 pages into the new one and thoroughly enjoying it.theres something very comforting about the long strings of results.

i finished it already. Seems like the book his repetition was made for. The tension from the cumulative effect of fixtures after fixtures after fixtures.the pressure,the remorselessness of the season are so well conveyed.and how even victory provides no respite as the next season needs to be prepared for immediately.

and shankly's monomaniacal interest in liverpool and football,and his extreme will to always accommodate fans,always respond to them and engage with them.his almost saintly asceticism and dedication.

Just finished Red Or Dead. Absolutely loved it. Remarkable how DP sets up Shankly to be more or less the polar opposite of Clough in The Damned Utd and the second (post-retirement) half is simultaneously very funny and painfully moving; see the chapter "On Watering The Garden."

Looking forward to it but it is not really available in the US yet. Wondering if I should finally get around to reading GB84 or the Tokyo books while I am waiting.

I've been on the fence about reading this, how reverential is it? Shankly's such a sainted individual and I'm not sure how interested I am in reading Peace's take on that.

It's as reverential as it needs to be but is not blind to the commitment that finally did for him. He knows he is slowly killing himself but never really thinks of himself. Above all it's about Liverpool and socialism and life and death. Beautifully written prose poetry; if I could write a hundredth as well as DP does I'd be more than happy.

Shankly's such a sainted individual and I'm not sure how interested I am in reading Peace's take on that.

Hmmmmmm, or Liverpool FC and Liverpool in general. Someone will undoubtedly get me it for my Christmas!

Jimmy Saville, another possible subject for the pen of David Peace

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Tom D.), Thursday, 8 January 2009 17:59 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...errrrrrrrrr

Actually I think that would be brilliant but it's way too soon and he'd be pilloried.

A sequel about Bob Paisley would be nice.

Let's just throw in Roy Evans and be done with it.

Still waiting on the Geoffrey Boycott one