David Peace, Novelist

(But not in Waterstone's.)

So much for hipsters.

I am with NRQ: the book looks interesting to me.

I've only so far read the first of the West Riding Quartet; 1974. A very effective, bleak style; all short, harsh sentences, and a great sense of the journalist character's mind working through the first person style. I think perhaps that once some answers had to be produced late on in the novel, it lost a little bit of the haunting quality, but it still worked. It was overall a very disturbing portrayal of the north, and specifically West Yorkshire... and I look forward to reading the other 3 books. And GB84 indeed; it sounds very interesting. The Miner's Strike could well be even more effective a setting as the Yorkshire Ripper killings [though admittedly '1974' doesn't specifically reference this, iirc] and police corruption.

I'm not a hipster, I'm a literary editor...

http://redriding.channel4.com/

that looks good.

I liked Tokyo Year Zero -- only thing I've read by him so far.

heard about this dude on, ulp, k-punk, sounds really interesting

I started Tokyo Year Zero but I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. Maybe I'll give it another try.

Not only is GB84 epic and important; it is also now available, in large trade paperback format, for £2 by the counter in Fopp at Cambridge Circus.

Love this author, would take GB84 over The Damned Utd on balance, although still stoked for the TDU movie.

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 hope we can have a really benign, benevolent fiction soon about Nigel Clough's harmonious future as coach at Derby County.

I didn't get on with Tokyo Year Zero either (incredibly bleak and very stylised), but I want to read his other stuff.

no knowledge of football

That'll be me, then. I've read, and loved, 1974, so maybe I'll give The Damned Utd a go next.

Oh good, let us know what you think!

from what I've read of Tokyo Year Zero so far, it practically starts off as intricate and confusing as the Red Riding ones get at the end when shit is getting real

The only concern I have about Peace: is he some Momus-level Wapanese fuck or what?

I mean after he writes his gritty Yorkshire tales, does he spend the evening being fed pocky by giggling prostitutes dressed as schoolgirls?

that would be about .4 on the Momus scale, presumably

he still comes across as more obsessed with Yorkshire than anything

maybe he should do a CROSSOVER

I think he has a wife and a couple of young children to support, in Tokyo; I don't see him living it up.

psh, probably talking about him supporting the wife is daft: whoever she is, she probably has a steadier income than he does. It's true about the bairns though, I think.

Picked up that £2 outsize GB84. The trouble with such cheapness, everywhere, is that it now has to take its place in a pile of about two hundred similar unread acquisitions

Timely revive - someone gave me The Damned United for Christmas, I was going to ask ILE about it. So it's good, then?

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, 8 January 2009 12:07 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

I did this as much as is humanly possible and loved it. Bought it for my mum for Xmas and she loved it too.

I've only read GB84; it was brutally perfect. I have Tokyo Year Zero but haven't ever felt in the mood to begin it ...

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

... having only the vaguest and sketchiest knowledge of Brian Clough, and caring so little about football that I can't actually think of a suitably dismissive metaphor, I'm obviously an ideal case study! A pal did suggest to me that lack of football knowledge wouldn't matter at all; that said, it's a book that obviously doesn't have immediate appeal for me.

Anyway. Intrigued by the RR books being made into TV. Anyone read them?

Timely revive - someone gave me The Damned United for Christmas, I was going to ask ILE about it. So it's good, then?

― Matt DC, Thursday, 8 January 2009 12:52 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah, I'd suggest reading it followed by http://www.amazon.co.uk/Provided-You-Dont-Kiss-Me/dp/0007247109, kinda like when TV stations bookend a movie with a documentary about the issues discussed.

I had Brian Clough's voice (or rather David Peace's Brian Clough's voice) as my interior monologue for about 2 months after reading The Damned Utd. Might explain why I did so badly at those job interviews last summer.

After Clough & Scargill, who could he do next? Bernard Manning? Mark E Smith?

Compo

Damned Utd isn't exactly heavy on the intricacies of football tactics, it's just well-observed northern swearing transplanted into sport instead of the Yorkshire underworld. It's so psychologically believable that I found it a bit hard to not just assume it was all straight fact, down to the desk smashing incident. It was drawn from a ridiculously wide range of sources, mind

Recall Marcello saying that the RR books do tend to degenerate into Tales From The Crypt a bit in their last quarters; the end of the second one (77) is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read, but also very faintly ridiculous

After Clough & Scargill, who could he do next? Bernard Manning? Mark E Smith?

Lancashire bastids.

Obv. Sean Bean is next on the list.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/05_01/warnockDM1205_468x356.jpg

But seriously though, Geoffrey Boycott

Michael Parkinson. Who knows what goes on beneath that suave exterior?

In the morning I get out of bed.
Right out of the bed.
Not half out of bed.
Right out of bed.

I look at the bed and I try to get as far away from it as possible.

Boycott has potential, that 100th century scenario was pretty dramatic

Potential for a David Peace spoof, at any rate

Leeds United FC: Their Decline And Fall

WHAT I'VE LEARNED THIS WEEK

The learning.
The doing.
The week.
The football. Always the football.

He was learning. Teaching. Learning -

HOW TO MANAGE.

His Wiki entry says that he's planning a book about Geoffrey Boycott next.

good, Geoff's one of the most enduring and weirdly engaging characters in post-war British sport

To be entitled "The Corridor of Uncertainty", hopefully.

Ha ha, no way, you're joking?!??!?

No that was from my own brane.

No, I meant about him writing a book about Geoffrey Boycott!

I briefly considered writing a "The Damned Rovers" parody, detailing Roy Race's brief stay as a player at Melborough. Someone else can steal that idea if they have any joeks.

"The Damned Rangers", detailing Paul le Guen's tenure at Ibrox could certainly work

x-post I really hope it's true too that would be amazing.

btw speaking of things that are incredibly Yorkshire, check this

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

I went to a d peace q&a and iirc he has done some early work on a Savile story but a completed novel is way, way off. He was really enthusiastic about a boycott book. The only thing he definitely doesn't want to do ever is Hillsborough.

yeah boycott i would read

holy shit red riding

the TV one I mean

everyone otm up thread about the flaws but still p superior stuff IMO despite not hearing any dialogue nor knowing why 1980 was even made tbh nor why nothing was explained and wait are we meant to be cheering for David Morrissey now cos fuck that

but still really enjoyed anyway.

David Morrissey is good.

oh yeah agreed but the character like

ah i can't remember who he was really. totally weird that i followed about 30% of this but still liked it.

just finished GB84 (it only hit US bookshops a few months ago a bit after red or dead's release here). arguably his hardest book to follow aside from nineteen eighty-three but completely worth it. I'd call it his bleakest book, but also arguably his best written.

I've now read all his books except the football ones, bc like GB84 they weren't available easily in the states till recently. are they worth a look? hearing v mixed stuff about red or dead, especially due to its style.

Adaptation(s) of red riding probably deserve more longstanding recognition

i didn't like them very much.

stoked for peace's plans on a novel about geoffrey boycott

red or dead is peace's masterwork for me. but you have to enjoy reading long passages of succinct football results

Hey.
I know I need a late-pass, but I'm 3/4 through the Red Riding novels and am enjoying them, if one can enjoy something so unremittingly bleak. the unanswered questions from book to book and the introduction of a new protagonist with each novel were pretty neat in that they were frustrating at first but I also find the unknown qualities and contexts pretty compelling too.

should i watch the films? opinions seem mixed with most upthread finding them a bit of a drag.

I thought they were brilliant

I've been watching the films, now. They are pretty good! Bordering on very good, but still borderline incomprehsible.

good to see he finally finished the tokyo trilogy. very good ending imo though will likely be incomprehensible to those who weren’t already fans of his style

Red Riding trilogy films are easily watched within the month of free BritBox subscription offer.