Red or Dead

My favourite book of last year David Peace's Red or Dead is released this month in America. This is my review (below) from the Sydney Morning Herald. It was a difficult review to write as I absolutely loved the book but I felt that I had to warn the casual reader and/or Liverpool fan that this was written in Peace's unique style which might, er, drive some people up the wall. I have no idea how this book will play in the States: the style is nuts, soccer is not popular, no one has heard of Bill Shankly and yet it's a masterpiece...Anyway this is what I came up with for the SMH: 
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Clough and Shankly

In an early scene in David Peace’s new novel, Red or Dead, the Liverpool Football Club players are anxiously waiting to meet their new manager, Bill Shankly. It is December 1959 and the club has been scuffing along in the Second Division for five years. Morale is at rock bottom, the Anfield ground is literally falling apart, and Liverpool hasn’t won anything for a generation. Shankly is a working class lowland Scot who has gained a reputation as a hard taskmaster. Stories begin to circulate around the dressing room about Shankly’s psychological acumen, his tactical genius and his knowledge of football lore:

            “Yeah I heard a story too. When he was manager at Carlisle. They were two down at half time. And they come in the dressing room. And the first thing Shankly does is grab the captain by the throat and he says, Why did you kick off the way you did? And the captain says, Because I lost the toss, Boss. So Shankly says, Well what did you call? And the captain says, Tails. And then Shankly calls him every name under the sun. Every bloody name there is. In front of the whole changing room. And then Shankly says, You never call tails. Everyone knows that. You never call tails!”  

            This was Bill Shankly in a nutshell: obsessed by details, mercurial and ever so slightly crazy. From day one as Liverpool manager Shankly instituted a new fitness regime, he watched what the players ate and drank, banned smoking and concentrated on the simple skills: passing, dribbling, passing again, faster and faster every time. Most of this was unheard of in English football in 1959 and Shankly’s team began to prove their worth. They won the Second Division title, got promoted, won the First Division title and then the FA Cup. They took home silverware in Europe and they won more league championships and FA Cups. The team Bill Shankly built became the greatest football club in the world in the 1970’s – although its period of supreme dominance came after Shankly’s shock retirement in 1974.

            Red or Dead is a thematic sequel to Peace’s previous best selling novel The Damned United which was about Brian Clough’s brief, disastrous tenure as manager of Leeds United. Clough and Shankly were among English football’s most important and influential managers of the post war era and in a few delicious passages in Red or Dead the two men interact and swap stories. In what must have been a libel lawyer’s nightmare Red or Dead also offers us scenes with the still living football legends: Kevin Keegan, Tommy Smith, John Toshack and Emlyn Hughes. There’s also one hilarious scene, which I hope is true, where Shankly and Bob Paisley fake a groin injury to striker Ian St-John. 

            Although there’s plenty of football in it, Red or Dead isn’t just a soccer novel – it’s also an acute psychological portrait of Shankly the man: an introverted extrovert, a loving husband, a mesmeric leader of men who longs for the anonymity of the terraces at the famous Anfield Kop.

            Shankly came from an impoverished Scottish mining village and his steadfast socialism is unpacked in two conversations with Labour leader Sir Harold Wilson; in a dazzling moment Wilson shows Shankly his most prized possession: a photograph of Wilson’s beloved Huddersfield Town signed by Nikita Khrushchev.

            David Peace’s prose style has been much commented on and criticised and it’s probably a good idea to read the beginning 20 pages of Red or Dead first, to see if you can hack it. Peace, who has lived in Japan for many years, has composed Red or Dead as a kind of repetitive Zen chant. Indeed, his method is so unwavering that there are passages in the book where the use of leitmotif and repetition reminded me of Jack Torrance’s manuscript in The Shining. But repetitive chanting is also the language of the football terraces and perhaps what Peace is doing here is giving us a flavour of what it is like to be a Red fan for ninety glorious minutes every Saturday.  

With its technical innovation and remarkable prose it is extraordinary that Red or Dead didn’t make the Booker Prize longlist. Extraordinary though perhaps not surprising:  Peace’s world is working class, northern, socialist and the love of football in Red or Dead is sincere, communitarian and quasi religious – a million miles removed from the sophisticated, ironic, metropolitan stance of, say, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch.

It's possible that Red or Dead may annoy some casual readers but their patience will be rewarded if they can last until the end. Peace isn’t just telling a story in this novel he’s also trying to teach us a new way of telling stories; like Bill Shankly, Peace is an artist determined to drag his chosen profession into exciting terra nova.  

Autobiography - Morrissey

Morrissey trying to conquer the world of literature and attempting to bring back the cream
denim jacket look; only one of these goals is hubristic...

I was half way through writing my review of Morrissey's Autobiography (which as you can see from a couple of posts ago (below) is already one of my favourite books of the year) when I read Terry Eagleton's review, here, in the Guardian and decided not to finish mine because his was so much better. Eagleton noticed many of things that struck me: the devastatingly brilliant evocation of 1960's Manchester, Moz's curious devotion to AE Housman (its hard to take Housman seriously after reading the classic essay Inside The Whale by George Orwell) the odd ad hominem attack on Julie Burchill, the 50 pages devoted to the contract dispute with The Smiths (about 40 pages too long)  etc. etc. Unlike all other Englishmen who were born in the 1950s and have written memoirs Morrissey - wonderfully - never mentions England's 1966 World Cup victory but he does recall fainting at the sight of George Best and watching every single Miss World contest with his mother. And he savages the sadistic dollards who seemed to be in charge of the British educational system from its beginnings right up until the 1980's. Anyway in lieu of a full review I'm giving you the first half of Eagleton's review instead. I've always liked Terry Eagleton, he was one of my philosophy tutors, and his course on literary theory at Oxford was the best series of lectures I've ever attended.
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Terry on Moz: 

Not content with being voted the greatest northern male ever, the second greatest living British icon (he lost out to David Attenborough) and granted the freedom of the city of Tel Aviv, Morrissey is now out to demonstrate that he can write the kind of burnished prose no other singer on the planet could aspire to. There are, to be sure, a few painfully florid patches in this superb autobiography ("Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate"), but it would be hard to imagine Ronnie Wood or Eric Clapton portraying the "Duchess of nothing" Sarah Ferguson as "a little bundle of orange crawling out of a frothy dress, the drone of Sloane, blessed with two daughters of Queen Victoria pot-dog pudginess". Morrissey despises most of the people he meets, often with excellent reason. 

He is scurrilous, withdrawn and disdainful, an odd mixture of shyness and vitriol. The dreamy, heart-throbbish photo on the cover of the book, the nose rakishly tilted above the Cupid's-bow lips, belies what a mean old bastard he is. He finds an image of himself in (of all people) the minor Georgian poet AE Housman, who preferred art to humanity and whose ascetic, spiritually tortured life seems to echo Morrissey's own. He admires wayward, bloody-minded types much like himself, and takes a sadistic delight in discomforting interviewers. "Why did you mention Battersea in that song?" a journalist asks him. "Because it rhymes with fatty," he replies. Taken by his father at the age of eight to watch George Best play at Old Trafford, he swoons at the sight of such artistry combined with such rebelliousness. Years later, others will swoon at his own mixing of the two.

Some of his bloody-mindedness springs from a damaged childhood. Born into a working-class Irish-Mancunian family, Steven Patrick Morrissey sang his way out of what struck him as a soulless environment, as other working-class Irish Mancunians have written or acted their way out. The vitriol started to flow early: his bleak mausoleum of a Catholic primary school was ruled by Mother Peter, "a bearded nun who beat children from dawn to dusk", and by the time he was 17 he was already emotionally exhausted. Manchester, still in its pre-cool days, was a "barbaric place where only savages can survive … There are no sexual guidelines, and I see myself naked only by appointment." His eloquent contempt for his fellow citizens is terrifying: "non-human sewer-rats with missing eyes; the loudly insane with indecipherable speech patterns; the mad poor of Manchester's armpit." The final indignity is to be turned down for a job as a postman at the local sorting office. At the hour of the birth of the Smiths, which gave him the exit from Manchester he craved, he felt himself dying of boredom, loneliness and disgust. "I would talk myself through each day," he writes, "as one would nurse a dying friend."

Not long afterwards, hordes of young people throughout the world are wearing his face on their chests. He returns to the streets where he grew up, now with a police escort, to sing to 17,000 fans from a stage overlooking an odious Inland Revenue office where he once worked. Having failed to find love from one man or woman, he can now find it from thousands. Mick Jagger and Elton John are eager to shake his hand. He enjoys his celebrity, but the sardonic self-irony of the book seeks to persuade us otherwise. There is a relish and energy about its prose that undercuts his misanthropy. Its lyrical quality suggests that beneath the hard-bitten scoffer there lurks a romantic softie, while beneath that again lies a hard-bitten scoffer. Implausibly, he claims to be "chilled" by road signs reading "Morrissey Concert, Next Left". It's true, however, that having spent years yearning to be seen, he now spends years longing to be invisible. Living in Hollywood is hardly the best place for that. He deals with his own egocentricity by being wryly amusing about it: his birth almost killed his mother, he comments, because even then his head was too big.

Even so, he remains for the most part icily unillusioned, like a monk passing through a whorehouse. His contempt for the music industry is visceral, and he prefers to spend his time reading Auden and James Baldwin. (Spotting Baldwin in a Barcelona hotel, he decides not to approach him, since even the mildest rejection would apparently mean he would have to go and hang himself.) The solution to all problems, he tells us, "is the goodness of privacy in a warm room with books". David Bowie tells him that he's had so much sex and drugs that he's surprised he is still alive, to which Morrissey replies that he's had so little of both that he feels much the same. Tom Hanks comes backstage to say hello, but Morrissey doesn't know who he is. The press lie that he is a racist, that he opened the door to a journalist wearing a tutu, that he hung around public toilets as a youth and that he would welcome the assassination of Margaret Thatcher. The Guardian runs a disapproving piece on him adorned with a photo of somebody else. When he discovers that a Smiths record released in Japan includes a track by Sandie Shaw, he begs the people around him to kill him. "Many rush forward," he adds.

You can read the rest of the excellent review, in the Guardian, here. I'd say that I was a little bit more criticial of the book than Terry who practically gushes towards the end of his piece. I mean there are flaws in Autobiography. Because of Morrissey's somewhat baroque style for example I'm still not clear what his dad for his living and whether his parents are still alive. Is he gay? Bisexual? Celibate? Moz thinks that's none of our business and maybe he's right but why not just tell us that instead of being so coy about it. I wonder too if the last 100 pages of the book couldn't have been a little more tightly edited. Yeah it can't be easy to edit Morrissey but that's why they pay you the big bucks at Penguin isn't it? And finally a book like this is crying out for an index, indexers don't charge that much so why Penguin Classics didn't pay for one is beyond me. Still, these are quibbles, I rated this an A in my books journal and it goes next to David Peace's Red or Dead as one of my favourites of the year. 

Books Of The Year - November Update

Occasionally in emails or tweets or blog comments I get asked what I'm reading at the moment or have enjoyed recently. It's an easy question for me to answer as I've been keeping a meticulous, nerdy, indexed (!) reading log that dates back to 1993. 
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I have no reading plan or set books; I don't read for self improvement (I'm with Dr Johnson on this one); I read exactly what I want to read when I want to (except occasionally when I have to read stuff for the newspaper). This then (below) is what my 2013 log looks like so far without the cross referencing, notes and index. The list is in chronological order. The grades are highly subjective, provisional and change frequently as time passes (and as you can see I'm a pretty easy grader).

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1. Plainwater - Anne Carson B

2. The Professor - Terry Castle A 

3. Just My Type - Simon Garfield B

4. The Generals - (audiobook) Thomas E Ricks A+

5. The Antidote - Oliver Burkeman B+

6. Why Does The World Exist - Jim Holt (began in 2012) B+

7. The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers (began in 2012) C+

8. Thinking The Twentieth Century - Tony Judt A

9. Our Times - AN Wilson B

10. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara A

11. The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt D

12. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace A

13. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton - Anne Sexton A

14. Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ * 

15. The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ *

16. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot B+

17. A Town Like Alice - Nevile Shute D

18. TransAtlantic - Colum McCann A

19. The Old Ways: a Journey On Foot - Robert Macfarlane (audiobook) A
20. Hope: A Tragedy - Sholem Auslander B-
21. The Crimson Petal And The White - Michel Faber A
22. The Far Side Of The World - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
23. Socrates and a Platypus Go Into A Bar - Daniel Klein E
23. The Reverse of The Medal - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
24. Inferno - Dan Brown (audiobook) C

25. The Thirteen Gun Salute - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+*
26. How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne In 21 Questions And An Answer - Sarah Bakewell B
27. Miami Blues - Charles Willeford A
28. Into The Silence - Wade Davis A
29. The Truelove - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) C*
30. The Finish - Mark Bowden B
31. The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane C
32. Armchair Nation - Joe Moran A
33. The Wine Dark Sea - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
34. Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling E
35. Wool 1-5 - Hugh Howey B
36. Sinead Morrissey - Parallax A
37. The Luminaries - Elanor Catton A
38. Red or Dead - David Peace A+
39. Edgelands - Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley A+
40. Longbourn - Jo Baker A
41. The Broken Road - Patrick Leigh Fermor A
42. Autobiography - Morrissey A-

The books that have really stuck out for me in 2013 so far have been The Generals, Red or Dead, Edgelands and Morrissey's Autobiography, and the Luminaries was pretty good too. As you can see I've had a pretty amazing run of books in the last 2 months beginning with Sinead Morrissey's Parallax and ending (so far) with the Moz himself. In case this gets taken as a kind of my-books-of-the-year blog (which I'll probably be too lazy to actually write) I should also mention the new crime novels by Declan Burke (Slaughter's Hound) and John McFetridge (Black Rock) both of which I read last year in galley and both of which I rank A+. Additionally, I just got the new Ian Rankin yesterday and although I've only looked at the cover, that smells like an A too. 
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* I'm working my way through the Patrick O'Brian audiobooks for the 4th time.

Life Without The Boring Bits And Other Myths About Writing

So I spent the last week or so at the Brisbane Writer's Festival doing a few readings, a few panels and conducting some writers workshops (whenever I use the word 'workshop' in a non carpentry related context I always think of that Kingsley Amis line from Jake's Thing "If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the war, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is.") I met many other writers, talked to readers, potential authors etc. and I've got a few thoughts that I'd like to share with you about the nature of writing in this and maybe one other post. 
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Many of the crime writers I talked to this week have absorbed the great Elmore Leonard's "10 rules of writing" and repeat these rules as if they are gospel. If you'll recall this is what Leonard says (you'll notice that there are actually 11 rules here): 

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. 
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
11. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Now Leonard was a sensible chap and a terrific writer and much of this is common sense; rules 3,4 and 5 are solid but, to me at least, the rest of these "rules" are utter bollocks. My old editor at Scribner told me that you'll "never lose a cent underestimating the intelligence or the patience of the reading public" and this is the unspoken master principle behind Leonard's rules and it's what many writers deeply believe. But what it amounts to is fear. You're afraid of being boring. You're afraid to make your reader work, you're afraid to make your reader sit through a scene of real life or a potentially tedious description of the real world. You're afraid of poetry. You're afraid of tangents. You're afraid, you're afraid, you're afraid. Yeah well, I say bugger that. Write the way you want to write and if people don't buy your books fuck 'em. Be brave. Tell your story your way. Follow your rules. Write the book for yourself, not for some imaginary lowest common denominator reader who doesn't know anything. Dan Brown is so afraid of his readers that he explains everything in his novels and talks to us as if we were five year old children. Do you really want to go down that road? Contra Leonard I say if it sounds like writing then well done you, you're probably taking trouble with your prose not just writing any old shite that moves the plot along. Dare to be purple or wordy or dull...I promise you that it won't kill you. I've just finished reading Red or Dead by David Peace and he breaks every single one of Leonard's rules. In spades. Red or Dead will annoy many (perhaps most) readers but Peace doesn't care because he's an artist who drags his literary plough over the stony ground. In Red or Dead Peace uses repetition and leitmotif to take British literature into terra nova and because of that he will still be read 100 years from now, long after the Dan Browns of this world have been consigned to the dustbin of history. 
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Joseph Conrad said that "A work of art should justify itself in every line" and I think that's a far more useful principle than any of the above rules by the late great Elmore Leonard. (Except for that thing about the exclamation marks and adverbs - yes Ms Rowling I am looking at you.) So what am I saying here? I'm saying ignore the bloody "rules" and write for yourself and if no one else digs it but you, maybe your book is complete and utter rubbish but maybe, just maybe, you're onto something new.  

Novels of the Decade

Let me jump on the listmania bandwagon and give you my favourite novels of the decade. Maybe these aren't the best books of the noughties but they're the ones I liked most.

1. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
3. L'Amour est très surestimé - Brigitte Giraud
4. Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino
5. Let the Right One In - John Lindqvist
6. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
7. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen
8. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
9. The Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
10. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters