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David PeaceDavid Peace
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Critical perspective
BiographyDavid Peace was born in 1967 and grew up in Ossett, near Wakefield. He left Manchester Polytechnic in 1991, and went to Istanbul to teach English. In 1994 he took up a teaching post in Tokyo and now lives there with his family.
The Damned Utd (2006), recreates Brian Clough's time at Leeds United Football Club, and was made into a film starring Martin Sheen, released in 2009.
Tokyo Year Zero (2007), is the first of a trilogy set in Tokyo in the aftermath of World War II, the second in the series being Occupied City (2009).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Crime
BibliographyNineteen Seventy-Four Serpent's Tail, 1999 Nineteen Seventy-Seven Serpent's Tail, 2000 Nineteen Eighty Serpent's Tail, 2001 Nineteen Eighty-Three Serpent's Tail, 2002 GB84 Faber and Faber, 2005 The Damned Utd Faber and Faber, 2006 Tokyo Year Zero Faber and Faber, 2007 Occupied City Faber and Faber, 2009 Red Riding (omnibus edition) Serpent's Tail, 2009
Prizes and awards2004 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) GB84 2008 British Book Awards Author of the Year (shortlist)
Critical PerspectiveFor those who go to novels seeking comfort or consolation David Peace does not come recommended. For those looking for something original he is indispensable. Peace’s work is unrelentingly bleak, formally daring and linguistically innovative. He eschews heroes and simplistic notions of good and evil; his customary themes are power, corruption and the way pain lingers, festers and takes on its own life. Even allowing for critical hyperbole, Peace is among the most powerful writers to have emerged in the last decade. It is difficult to imagine that there is any other novelist at currently at work who could do what he has done with the crime genre.
David Peace has been described by many critics as the English James Ellroy. He shares with the modern master of American noir a morbidly wry humor, an obsession with the often despotic nature of authority and an interest in the selfish nature of man. His clipped style, in which truncated sentences lend the prose a restless rhythm, is more than reminiscent of Ellroy’s: ‘Cats and bloody dogs. Motorway One back to Leeds, lorry-thick and the going slow.’ However, despite the obvious influence of Ellroy, David Peace is very much his own man. His writing is suffused with an intense apocalyptic poetry. And his use of repetition rivals that of Peter Cook, even if Peace’s use of it is based more on a desire to build a manic intensity than an absurdist comedy.
‘The Red Riding Quartet,’ Peace’s tetralogy of novels inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper murders is a remarkable achievement. Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty Three (2002) is an ingeniously interlinked and impressively sustained series of books. The novels are marked by extreme violence. And the characters, from dyspeptic journalists to policeman who rape and kill to venal property developers, are all too believable. The violence in Peace’s novels is gratuitous at times, but such is the force of the writing that the refusal to take the reader away from the most disturbing of images can be seen as a moral act. Peace is not writing for the nervous glee of the adolescent mind. His visceral, unflinching, in-your-face screams of rage demand you stare at the putrid stink of the world and feel its horror: ‘her intestines had spilled out onto the ground where they wallowed like pigs in the mud.’ This is not writing for those benumbed by the ubiquity of onscreen horror. It is for those who still want to register its impact.
Having raised his own bar very high with the quartet, you might imagine that Peace would have approached his next novel with some trepidation, especially given that it was the first outside a series of connected stories. However, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizewinning GB84 (2005) reveals just how fearless a writer David Peace is. The 1984/5 Miner’s Strike was the most divisive event in recent British history, a time when left and right were sharpy defined, when the demagoguery and fanaticism of Mrs. Thatcher and Arthur Scargill helped destroy families and communities. The country was in a state of virtual civil war. Peace recreates the turbulence of this period in what he describes in one of his typical author’s notes as ‘a fiction in a novel based upon a fact.’
GB84 combines documentary realism – diaries from two striking miners which capture the day to day struggle, the sweat and blood of the picket line, the pitched battles with the police, the endless boredom and endless talking – with a fast-paced conspiracy thriller. The latter is the fictional tale of ‘the Jew’ – a mysterious Government operative involved in an ongoing operation to destroy the strike – and the swirl of Neo-Nazi mercenaries around his driver and cohort Neil Fontaine. Peace is unrelenting in his attempt to demonstrate the disturbing lengths to which the Government will go to crush the dispute. He juxtaposes the unscrupulous actions of the Government with the ultimately fatal hubris of the NUM leadership. He depicts a corrupt and incompetent organisation, beset by pettiness and the establishment of factions, ill-equipped to take on a Government going beyond the law in the search for its victory. GB84 is brutal, harsh, haunting and despairing. Peace is utterly uncompromising in the telling of his story. The novel makes great demands on the reader’s patience and attention. At times GB84 is difficult to follow, but it is the very complexity which makes the effort of reading all the more worthwhile. Peace demands you find your way through the shadows. GB84 is a significant book, a testament to the wounds, still open for many, of a time when the country was fighting for its soul.
Nothing could have prepared readers for the novel which followed GB84. The Damned Utd (2006), a recreation of Brian Clough’s 44-day reign at Leeds United in 1974, is as vital and fresh as anything in contemporary British fiction. It is not only one of the best books ever written about sport, it is among the most memorable novels written on any subject in the last decade. Peace creates an intense, irrepressible, incantatory rhythm; he manages to get so deeply inside the psychology of Brian Clough that it is hard to imagine that any conventional biography could come as close to capturing the Shakespearean grandeur and manifold contradictions that constituted the essence of ‘old big ‘ead’. Peace splits his narrative between two strands of Clough’s life: in the second person we see a young man, his playing career destroyed by injury, reinventing himself as the most exceptional manager in the country; and in the first person we see a national celebrity, high on the incredible feat of winning the First Division Championship with Derby County, accepting the top job at Leeds Utd, a club he despises. Peace’s treatment of Clough’s pride is fascinating.
In 2007 Peace published the first part of the Tokyo Trilogy. Tokyo Year Zero deals with a post Second-World War city bleeding from the inside out. Detective Minami is reluctantly investigating the murder of two young women. He is also trying, and failing, to fight away the ghosts of his past. Just how is this man connected to these deaths? In the constant repetitions, the movement from rapid, bare narrative to fevered interior monologue and grandiloquent pronouncement, Peace finds his customary poetry. However, for all its stylistic verve Toyko Year Zero lacks the intensity of Peace’s other work. It is formally reminiscent of GB84 yet does not have the force of that novel. Nor does the central character compel the reader’s attention. What you are left with is a striking portrait of a ravaged city, where ‘no one is who they say they are,’ and ‘no one is who they seem to be.’ This sense of disturbed place is the most convincing and memorable aspect of the novel.
Garan Holcombe, 2008
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