War on Peace

Back in early 2007 I posted a brief comment here on David Peace's remarkable novel, "The Damned United", about the late football manager Brian Clough. I've read it again since, and I still like it.

The Clough family, however, doesn't like it one bit. With a film based on the book (loosely based, from the bits that I've seen on TV) about to appear, the family has co-operated in the production of a documentary telling their side of the story. Peace's Clough was a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, Ramsey-swearing genius who wasn't above accepting a few quid in a plain brown envelope once in a while. The man the family remembers seems to have been a mordant wit who only just failed the audition to join the Twelve Apostles.

Clough was a moderately successful manager with Hartlepool and Brighton and an amazingly successful one with Derby County and Nottingham Forest. His only failure was his brief tenure at Leeds, in between his triumphs at Derby and Forest. It's not surprising that a novelist like Peace would choose to examine this low point in Clough's career, rather than the more upbeat parts. Peace's achievement is to demonstrate how the personality traits that stood Clough in good stead elsewhere failed him so spectacularly at Leeds. Leaving aside the smoking, swearing and boozing, which most of us would consider to be minor sins, Peace's Clough is a dedicated and decent family man who can't quite believe what he's got himself into. It's a work of fiction, and some of the more bizarre episodes are completely made up (Clough's burning of his predecessor Don Revie's desk, for example), but for anyone who watched Clough's career from the outside, it's quite credible.

So I think the family is protesting unduly -- and in some ways, may inadvertently have proved Peace's point. The documentary recounted how Clough was waiting at FA headquarters for an interview for the job of England manager, a post he craved. An old gent came past and began to struggle up the stairs, prompting Clough to yell after him that a man in his condition should take the lift, in case his heart gave out on the stairs. That gent was, of course, one of the panel who were about to interview Clough. The family also claims that the entire interview process was a fix -- the FA already knew who it was going to appoint -- but as there are no written records of the interviews, that claim is no less fictitious than anything in Peace's book.

Peace is a challenging writer and a bit of an oddball. His speciality is fiction based on real people and real events. Before "The Damned United" he wrote a searing indictment of the Yorkshire police (recently televised as the Red Riding trilogy) and a novel on the unpromising theme of the miners' strike. He now lives in Tokyo and is writing a trilogy on that city in the aftermath of World War 2. The first volume, Tokyo Year Zero, is already out in paperback. It makes The Damned United look like Little Miss Muffet, but fortunately for Peace, all of the protagonists are now dead.