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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

David Peace

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:11 / 18.03.04

Just finished "Nineteen Seventy-Seven", the second part of the Red Riding Quartet, and was wondering if anyone else had immersed themselves in Peace's hell? I read "Nineteen Seventy-Four" a few months back, and was utterly blown away, but had to give it a few months before getting back into the guy's head.

Dark, dark stuff. Some of the darkest (and I don't necessarily mean graphically so) crime fiction I've ever read. Set over the space of nine years in Yorkshire, the quartet is a study in police corruption, human violence and madness.

But his prose is fucking beautiful. In a way (although there's very little similarity) his lyricism reminds me of some of Iain Sinclair at his most sordid, only up north instead of down here in the Smoke.

I almost bought "Nineteen Eighty" yesterday... but I think I'll wait a while and think happy thoughts first. He's immensely readable, but not an easy read at all.

Specifically (and, in fact, the reason I started this thread) has anyone read his new one "GB84", about the Miners' Strike? I heard him being interviewed on R4's Front Row about it the other day, and it sounds fucking wicked. However, I have two more of his meditations on the culture surrounding the Yorkshire Ripper to get through yet, so it'll have to wait. Interested to know from anyone who's read it, though.

06:21 / 19.03.04

Not read GB84 yet, although love the Red Riding Quartet (as I'm living in the West Riding now, especially). I interviewed him a couple of years ago as well. You can read it here. Lovely bloke.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:27 / 19.03.04

I have to say, I was struck (and shocked) to hear him on the radio- he genuinely did seem like a nice guy; not the complete psycho I was expecting. Cheers for the link.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:28 / 19.03.04

Great interview, btw.

08:28 / 24.03.04

Nice of you. There's a better-written one from the Independent a couple of weeks ago here.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:08 / 16.04.04

Is it just me, or is Nineteen Eighty heavily influenced by Throbbing Gristle? I know as a fan I may well be seeing correspondences where there are none, but hey, it's set in Yorkshire in 1980, so it would make sense.

Tons of stuff- recurring phrases "Death Factory", "Assume This Phone Is Tapped", "Nothing Short of Total War"...

the use of "e" instead of "I" in the Ripper/victim stream of consciousness passages (or "transmissions", another phrase that's very TG...)

I'm sure there're more, but they're the only ones I can think of right now.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:07 / 16.04.04

The Manson quote "can the world be as sad as it seems?", also used extensively by TG.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:33 / 16.04.04

Ah. I can answer my own question there.

He WAS listening to Throbbing Gristle. I'm not mad after all! Hooray!

--

03:07 / 18.04.04

H'mm, I'll have to check this guy out. Anyone who is influenced by TG and Burroughs seems worth seeking out...

Actually, recently I've been thinking that there is a rich vein of imagery and creativity that can be tapped from all those 80's "extreme" groups that many people would rather ignore(ie. TG, Coil, Current 93, Whitehouse, Neubauten, SPK and others). A lot of that type of music inspires my own writing efforts. It's interesting to see I'm not alone in this train of thought.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:39 / 24.05.04

I've just come to the end of the Quartet.

Fucking hell, was that intense or what?

He totally immerses you in the bad brains of his characters... even the ones you'd rather not know about. Especially those.

Perfectly plotted, and with some nicely experimental twists to the way he writes from one character to the next.

Haunting images... repeated phrases that build like poetry.

And above all... a massively complex, epic plot which is told by a succession of different voices, and which manages to be dark enough that the whole Yorkshire Ripper investigation, while explored in very gruesome detail over the course of the middle two books, still manages to be a sideshow to the main event- the main even being a tale of police corruption and human brutality which spans the nine years covered until a final bloody revenge which still doesn't seem like a solution...

Fucking amazing.

stephen_seagull

11:54 / 24.05.04

I haven't read any of Peace's earlier stuff, but I'm currently trying to get through GB84, but haven't actually gotten any further than the first couple of pages. Frankly, it's a rather difficult read even that early on, due to the complexity of a narrative that has different voices speaking, for the most part, simultaneously. However, having noticed this thread, I'm going to try my best to read it. Once I've finished watching Giant that is...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:01 / 24.05.04

Yeah, he does take effort (again, another reason he reminds me of Sinclair- his combinations of words are wonderful to behold, but you have to put the work in to see the overall narrative. He can be very abstract, and, as you say, the different voices, at least in the ones I've read, are left up to you to disentangle) but it's well worth it. Stay with it for a while- if GB84's anything like the others, it will soon become gripping.

stephen_seagull

18:48 / 26.05.04

Well, I've made some progress with GB84. I decided to start from the beginning again, because I initially started reading it just after returning from the Easter holidays more than a month ago. Or at least, I think I did. I don't remember - which was why I felt I had to begin again.

Anyway, 50 pages in, and I'm kinda hooked. I'm not normally interested in politics, but a good ol' bit of corruption can normally rouse my interests (,though the only immediate example to pop into my miniscule mind is LA Confidential).

Having taken a unit on narrative this semester, realism and self-referentialism are heavy on my mind. Despite the use of italics, which are the only example of a self-referential device I have been apt enough to discover so far, the narrative is for the most part 'realist', which is an obvious choice, considering Peace's novel is basically the literary world's equivalent of the docudrama.

As for the various narrative voices, I think I've gotten the hang of it. I shall read on...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:41 / 26.05.04

That's good to hear- I'm buying it tomorrow (payday! payday! yay and way-hay day!)

15:01 / 08.06.04

I read "Nineteen Seventy Four" the other night and it was not bad, which is better than not good but not as good as good. Someone has been reading his James Ellroy very closely, I think. A few of the scenes came off very forced and I sort of didn't buy the denouement... but page-by-page it was really not bad.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:10 / 19.06.04

To be honest, much as I loved "Nineteen Seventy-Four", they do get better. (I think "Nineteen Eighty" is the best, but that could just be because of the TG references). He seems less of an Ellroy junkie the further you get, basically.

Frotter- it's a while since I read 74, and I'm gonna have to read them again at some point soon with hindsight- but- no major spoilage, but what role does the Rev Laws play in it? (He's one of the few characters who's in all of them).

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:01 / 14.08.07

Got about halfway through The Damned Utd, which I was really enjoying despite my hatred of football, but got distracted by Harry fucking Potter, and by the time I was about to go back to it, Tokyo Year Zero was out, so I'm reading that now (with The Damned Utd as a follow-up, back to the beginning)...

Tokyo Year Zero is ace so far (about 100 pages in). IMHO Peace has a better grasp of rhythm than pretty much any writer I've read in many years (Palahniuk when he's in the zone can come close, but if anyone can beat Peace on this one I NEED to read them)... remember the old Lee & Herring "but it's the repetition that makes it funny" thing? It's the repetition that makes it downright inescapable.

It's set in Tokyo in 1946- "The Losers" are living in squalor, it's a time of purges in the police department, and against this backdrop Minami is trying to solve a murder case (again, with Peace, it's a real case- again we're in the realm of novelistic docudrama)...

Peace's worldview, whether looking at the Yorkshire Ripper, the Miner's Strike, Leeds United (from what I've read of Damned) or post-war Tokyo is unremittingly bleak. EVERYONE's an asshole. And not in some cool, Miller/Ennis sort of way. NOBODY's cool. I'll wait until I've finished both Tokyo Year Zero and Damned before I get into the morality I think I see behind it, because I don't want to be proved wrong two pages after hitting POST.

But fuck, the guy can't half write.

13:20 / 21.08.07

Haven't read any of his books, but there's an interesting article about him in the current issue of Word magazine (Johnny Marr cover).

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:37 / 27.08.07

Ooh, must buy that, cheers for the heads-up.

D'you know, I thought it would be impossible to write a bleaker crime novel than the Red Riding Quartet. I thought I wouldn't be able to get as immersed in something as far away temporally and geographically as post-war Japan as I could with England in the 70s.

But fucking hell.

FUCKING HELL.

I'm looking forward to, and dreading, the next one in equal measures.

I'm also toying with the idea that Peace, along with Sinclair, may be the greatest crafters of prose that the English language currently have. And both for ENTIRELY different reasons. Sinclair chucks adjectives at everything. Peace is economical, minimal.

FUCK ME that was a good book.

03:24 / 28.08.07

Just finished 'The Damned United', which I liked very much.

The idea of this uncompromising, self-destructive man of the people, on top of his game in the early Seventies, but unable to keep going because of the Furies in the bathroom mirror, even when he's doing well as a manager, means issues like the following show up;;

'The board of directors aren't offering, but I light a cig, and pour meself a large brandy, and then I say to them, the cowering fucking wankers "I'm not doing fucking owt that you say, you pathetic bastards. Because I'm fucking Brian Clough!'

There's a sense that he'll be allowed to get away with, say, setting fire to his former manager's desk, or related, but only if the lads keep putting the ball in the back of the net. And that sooner or later he's going to run out of luck.

The thing being that actually, Cloughie is not a gambler, and that he knows what he's doing, sort of.

As someone who's against football and everything to do with it, I did find this faux-biography (all the fixtures, historical events etc are accurate, apparently - the speculation is to do with Brian's mind) very gripping, so; recommended.

And anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't fucking belong on Brian's pitch.

You have no heart

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:02 / 28.08.07

I really enjoyed what I read of it, and will read the whole thing very soon, despite also hating football. It appears to me that what Peace does very well is put us into the heads of people going insane under pressure. Whether they're cops, football managers, or union leaders, that's what he does REALLY well.

Two days later and Tokyo Year Zero is still kicking me in the face every time I think about it. If this is indeed the first part of a trilogy then I am simultaneously in anticipation and dread of the next two.

That's what Peace does well- STRESS. I don't think anyone I've ever read has ever done it better. It doesn't matter WHO the guy is he's writing about at the time, he makes you FEEL their anxiety like nobody else I've read. I smoke a LOT more when I'm reading Peace... I bite my nails a lot more too.

In an ideal Borgesian world, Peace would write the "occult history" (as he calls it) of everything EVER. In an ideal world, they'd all be totally fictional.

AFAICT, life to Peace is ALWAYS like a crime novel. GB84 was the Miners' Strike written as a crime novel, The Damned Utd the tenure of a football manager written as a crime novel.

Everything is seen through the lens of stress.

15:43 / 28.08.07

I know what you mean; while I was totally there with Cloughie as he fought his ongoing, doomed war with his demons all the way through a book that Clough himself might have felt was 'truthful ... no messing about', I wouldn't necessarily rush out to buy anything else by Peace.

Too stressful, as you say.

Although Clough, pretty clearly, would kick me hard in the balls, then pour me a brandy, light me a cig and then put me on the fucking transfer list for being such a fucking shithouse, I fear.

16:14 / 28.08.07

Though I would say 'The Damned Utd' is basically a comedy.

21:24 / 14.10.07

Currently about halfway through The Damned Utd. Struggled a bit at first to follow the shifts between the two teams, but I think I’m getting there now. It’s actually more restrained than I thought it might be at first, the outbursts more tension increasing than releasing, to the ends that it’s more realistic and, well, depressing. The same sort of idea as above, repetition, density, mounting pressure, the inner monologue pushing thoughts through the same word tunnels, brushing the sides a little more each time. I think the only thing at my back of my mind is knowing that I don’t have much of a frame of reference for Clough or English Football in that period – whether, beyond the facts, Peace captures, or even if he intends to capture, the actual qualities of his subject. I don’t think the novel should be judged on that, but I’d be interested in how much someone more familiar with the period would asses the book, how much of a departure Peace’s fiction is making from reality. Anyway, I’m enjoying it quite a bit regardless, and I quite fancy reading GB84 next (though maybe after a bit of a break).

Have you finished it yet Stoatie?

nedrichards is confused

15:27 / 07.11.07

Knowing a bit about Clough (and indeed being a football fan) I'd compare it more to say David Foster Wallace's 'Lyndon' in Girl with curious hair. That is, that the story is emotionally true, even if it's probably not actually true (aside from the events that happened, if that makes sense). One thing that's undeniable is that it's a brilliant book and right up there with BS Johnson's The Unfortunates in my favourite bits of fiction about football.

15:28 / 16.11.07

The impression I got was that some sort of emotional truth was what Peace was aiming at, based on real events, but I suppose so much of the book, ok all of it, is based on his private thoughts that it's probably unverifiable anyway.

At something of a tangent, I just finished reading a book on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and realised what sort of scope there is for doing a similar sort of fictional biography of the former dictator, and how well equipped someone like Peace would be to do it, based on his treatment of Clough. Not to suggest that Clough was close to being a mass-murdering fuckhead, but the similarities in personal qualities was striking: the aggressive bullying, the need to be loved, the similar kinds of obsession with having one's name and image known, the incongruous seeming level of value placed on family, the self-deception in how they saw themselves. Basically, I think a similar interior treatment of how Saddam managed to balance his view (and to some degree the reality) of himself as a loving father, man of the people and strong leader with the clearly imbalanced and reality-challenged events that he was responsible for would be fascinating. If anything, if it was written at the same standard Peace achieved, it could be terrifying. Just a thought.

Also, I have picked up GB84. Joy. Or not I suppose.