Book review: The Times, September, 2006
The Damned Utd by David Peace - Faber and Faber.
Football books are habitually the bastions of orthodoxy: play it tight, keep it solid at the back and let's hope for a sneaky win. Enter David Peace and a bloody-minded resolve to eschew the metaphorical 4-4-2.
Appropriately, he has brought to the genre the maverick properties of his protagonist, Brian Clough. The outcome is an expansive and ambitious piece of work dropping between fact and fiction, biography and novel, where two time-frames run in parallel, perspectives alternate and no shirking at the back, young man.
In itchy, microscopic detail Peace focuses on Clough's 44 days as manager of Leeds United in the late-summer of 1974. It was a disastrous union, for Clough reviled all that Leeds epitomised; their flintiness, their conceit, their dishonesty. Famously, he told them to throw away medals won under their former manager, his nemesis Don Revie, because they had been secured by 'bloody cheating.' Clough was going to make 'dirty Leeds' beautiful, at whatever cost.
Peace has researched his subject assiduously, listing 36 source books at the back of his own, among them David Storey's This Sporting Life and John Braine's Room at the Top. He has borrowed their arid expressiveness and sense of place and set it to a rhythm of repetition similar to WH Auden or Tony Harrison. The prose is like studs clank-clanking on a changing room floor, always alliterative. Alliterative, always. Mostly the rich fusion is satisfying but - similar to any work with a bold stylistic objective - it grates sporadically and the exercise can eclipse the story.
The widescreen imagination is all his own of course and he lays it out unfettered. His ability to 'become Clough' is disconcertingly convincing and this characterisation forms the book's dynamism. The only hitch of presenting such a well-drawn portrait, especially for the sport-informed reader, is extricating the real Clough from the 'fictional' one. While marvelling at Peace's inventiveness and recognising the sanctity of artistic licence, the reader is often nagged by the thought (and consequently drawn away from the narrative): is this real or made up?
At least Peace's approach side-steps the converse problem of most works of sports fiction where setting it in an imaginary world lends it an unshakeable comic value. However realistic and liniment-soaked the text, as soon as an author mentions a game against Ironcastle United or an away trip to Cromford Bridge, believability ebbs away.
Since Clough is no longer with us and therefore outside the dominion of libel law, Peace is at liberty to portray him as he wishes, which is generally unfavourably. We are all familiar with his out-size ego but the alcoholism, greed, selfishness and stupidity is also finely detailed; maybe it's in those other 34 books and Peace has merely condensed the blemishes into a bruise. Only in his dealings with his family, especially his sons, are we shown Clough's considerate side. In the midst of the rants and rows and smashed up office furniture, he invariably has a pat on the head, a ruffle of the hair, for an offspring.
Faber, the publisher, has presumably had its lawyers rake through the text for potential defamation of those still alive. Johnny Giles, for example, is related as sly and manipulative and few players or managers have dignity or decency painted upon them. They are almost all universally hard, out for themselves, fiddling, conniving and getting their retaliation in first. Whack, take that.
Peace understands implicitly that football clubs are mini Roman empires with shin pads instead of shields, tracksuits instead of togas. Clough, therefore, is the emperor back from conquering foreign territories, bestowed a kingdom where he is despised by his subjects. In the shadows lurk usurpers such as Giles, Bremner, Lorimer; men with a glint in their eye, a knife in their hands. Clough deserves his downfall (albeit with a hearty pay-off) because, the same as many visited by greatness, he fails to recognise its limits, to understand where confidence runs into arrogance and that expediency is superior to bravado.
Each year, one or two football books cross over to mainstream appeal and Peace's is well positioned to make this journey. He has found himself one of sport's most intriguing stories, teeming with characters and sub-plots, and set about it with panache. True football lovers will feel that in his scramble to stack high bricks fired in bleakness he has neglected the joy of the game, the humour, but that is for another book, another story. This one knows that its place is with the avaricious and the megalomaniacs, sifting briskly through the grime and happy to be there.