9 replies to this topic

[NBooth]

Link to our threads on the movie versions of Red Riding and [url="http://artsandfaith.com/index.php?showtopic=22394&st=0&p=192225&hl="the%20damned%20united"&fromsearch=1&#entry192225"]The Damned Utd[/url]. Link, too, to our thread on "Mystery and Detective Fiction" where Peace's books come up.

Right, then. All linking being out of the way...has anyone else here read Peace? I'm midway through the Red Riding Quartet, having finished all that's out of the Tokyo Trilogy, and I'm absolutely in love with this man's work. Which is an odd thing to say, given the topics he writes about (and, if anything, his books are darker than the films based on them, as I observed here), but something about his books compels reading.

They're not for the faint of heart; even his protagonists do horrible things to themselves and to other people, and the worlds he writes about (Yorkshire in the seventies; Tokyo just after WWII) are decaying and sordid. Things seldom end well; if you're the protagonist in a Peace novel you can bet that you'll end up insane, dead, or insane then dead. And yet, Peace shows the desperation of these times and men so effectively that one can't help but be sucked in.

Recently, I came across a 'blog called k-punk, and the author there has several posts on Peace, including this one: "'Can the World be as Bad as it Seems?' David Peace and Negative Theodicy". In that post, the author gets to what I think is the heart of Peace's relationship with the sordid:

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In Peace's hands, this question becomes an urgent theological enquiry, the very relentlessness of the sadness and misery he recounts calling forth an absent God, a God who is experienced as absence, the great light eclipsed by the world's unending tears. The deeply ambivalent TG-esque preacher Reverend Laws (who, TG-like, replaces "I" with "E" and "the" with "thee") may be the one who can put us in touch with this God, the Abandoned Christ who is himself forsaken, the redeemer who is not the creator. But the world, the sad, desolated world, is full of angels whose wings have either been shorn off, reduced to stubble, or which have grown into gigantic, dirty monstrosities... addict angels hooked on alcohol, casual but incessant lusts, and the trash of the consumer society that is struggling to be born out of the wreckage of the Fordist social consensus... angels whose ultimate response to the world is puking (everyone pukes in Peace's books), throwing up the whiskies and the undercooked crispy pancakes, but never being able to purge any of it, never being able to take flight.

Peace is, in The Red Riding Quartet, clearly interested in religion; at one point in Nineteen Seventy Seven, Jack Whitehead finds his thoughts about the Yorkshire Ripper and the pornography ring he's uncovered mixing with images of Christ on the Cross; the suffering Christ and the suffering world seem to be linked, but the only way out Whitehead can finally discover is an amateur lobotomy at the hands of an insane preacher. From what I understand of the way the Quartet ends, it's not so redemptive as the filmed adaptations--Peace seems to be a pessimist in many ways regarding the hope for change in this world (of course, his next novel--due out in 2012--is Tokyo Regained, which holds out a promise, at least, of some sort of redemption).

[I notice that I've not said anything about Peace's prose style, which I've seen compared to Ellroy in several places. I've run on too long for an introductory post already, so let me just say that I find Peace's voice incantatory, moving--powerfully pulling the reader along toward the final dissolution that replaces resolution in the books].

Has anyone else here read these books?

Edited by NBooth, 24 July 2011 - 09:41 AM.

[Ryan H.]

NBooth, on 24 July 2011 - 09:19 AM, said:

Has anyone else here read these books?

I haven't, but you certainly have me intrigued.

[NBooth]

NBooth, on 24 July 2011 - 09:19 AM, said:

From what I understand of the way the Quartet ends, it's not so redemptive as the filmed adaptations--Peace seems to be a pessimist in many ways regarding the hope for change in this world (of course, his next novel--due out in 2012--is Tokyo Regained, which holds out a promise, at least, of some sort of redemption).

I'm going to have to revise that statement, because while the ending of the Quartet is hardly as uplifting as the filmed trilogy, it's actually in some ways more redemptive; like Whitehead, Maurice Jobson finds the only hope possible in the figure of the crucified Christ--and in a vision of Jack Whitehead himself:

Spoiler

'How can you still [...] believe?' I shouted. 'After all the things you've seen?'
'It's the things I've not seen,' he said.
'I don't understand.'
'During an eclipse there is no sun,' he smiled, 'Only darkness.'
'I don't--'
'The sun is still there,' he said. 'You just can't see it.'
'I--'
'But in your heart you know the sun will shine again, don't you?'
I nodded.
'Faith,' he whispered--
'The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
I turned again to the Pieta. I turned back to the wounded Christ--
No other name.
There was a hand squeezing mine--
A ten-year-old girl with blue eyes and long straight fair hair, wearing an orange waterproof kagool, a dark blue turtleneck sweater, pale blue denim trousers with a distinctive eagle motif on the back left pocket and red Wellington boots, holding a plastic Co-op carrier bag in her other hand.
I looked down at my hand in hers--
There were no bruises on the backs of my hands [where before there have been through the entire book--bruises indicating the permanent damage to Jobson's soul]
'He was not abandoned,' smiled Clare [Kemplay, the dead girl--also the name of Jobson's daughter] 'He is loved.'

In a way, I think the section I've spoilered out is far stronger than what we get in the films, and more in keeping with the world of the books.

Having finished the Quartet, I'm inclined to think that the second book (Nineteen Seventy-Seven, which deals with Jack Whitehead) is the strongest of the lot; certainly the figure of Jack looms even larger in the novels than Eddie Dunford or Maurice Jobson; everyone thinks about him, everyone tries to find him to talk to him--in the end, he becomes a kind of heartbroken mystic-sage. The fact that he's cut so decisively out of the film versions demands an almost complete reworking of the final two movies--something I'll probably bring up when I get around to re-watching 1983 and comparing my thoughts on the book-vs-film issue in the appropriate thread.

EDIT: One other thing: I've seen the adaptations compared to Lynch, and it's got to be said that most of that comparison holds true to the books as well; Peace's books are almost letter-perfect examples of the sort of thing Lynch would do if he wrote crime thrillers. This is particularly true of Nineteen Eighty--which is funny, since of all the films the adaptation of that novel is the most straightforward.

Edited by NBooth, 18 August 2011 - 02:41 PM.

[NBooth]

FWIW, Starbucks will be giving away a free digital copy of The Damned Utd. in the near future. But only in Britain, it looks like.

[NBooth]

Did the server switch-over eat a bunch of posts? Ah, well. I'll just stick this quote back here because I think it's worth having in the thread:

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Reading is important and people don't do it enough, again myself included. It does seem to me, holed up out here in my Tokyo bunker, that the affluent societies of the East and the West lack any form of direction or guidance, that we are simply spinning in a moral void. Where religion and government have either been banished or abdicated, business has stepped in. To bastardise Dylan, it would seem to me that one has to be moral to live outside God and we are plainly not. I still believe reading to be a redemption of sorts and that with e-mail and the Internet we are perhaps reading (and writing) more and watching less. Either way though, we're still talking too much and listening too little. I don't distinguish between religion and politics; just as everything is political, so it is religious. For me politics is the asking of questions, religion the receiving of answers. But we have known in our hearts the answers for almost two thousand years; that we chose to ignore those answers is the greatest crime.

[Anna J]

NBooth, on 04 December 2011 - 01:00 PM, said:

Did the server switch-over eat a bunch of posts?

Don't know - it's possible it is still migrating slowly. I'll look into it. Thanks!

[NBooth]

So I just finished The Damned Utd. It’s good—very good—and very different from the movie version. For one thing, the movie includes a redemption of sorts for Clough. That redemption is utterly absent in the novel. For another thing, Clough here is far darker and more obsessive than the Sheen version: he obsesses over his lost career as a footballer, obsesses over losing Derby, obsesses over Don Revie (though far less here than in the movie). Indeed, the theme here—as in most of Peace’s fiction—is obsession: obsession with the past, obsession with fame, obsession with self. The religious element, too, is here, but mostly by negation. Over and over, Clough insists that he doesn’t believe in God (though sometimes he wishes he did) or in luck. At the same time, the novel is prefaced by a quotation from Jeremiah 12:7-9—which points, I think, to a broader social meaning for the novel.

This broader context is underlined by the fact that Peace ends the novel by drawing a parallel between Margaret Thatcher’s win in 1979 and Clough’s triumph at the European Cup. I’m not entirely certain what this means, but it seems that Peace is drawing a parallel between Clough’s single-minded desire to win and Thatcher’s policies. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about what Thatcher’s policies were to make a more definitive pronouncement; I know that Peace is critical of her actions during the miner’s strike of 1984 (mainly because he wrote a book about it: GB84, the only remaining Peace novel I haven’t read). On the whole, I think I prefer the Red Riding quartet or the Tokyo books to this one, but it’s an engrossing read nonetheless.

There's also the matter of the title. "Damned" is used here in a double sense--on the one hand, it's similar to "Damned Yankees," but on the other we get the impression--both from the prefatory material and from one section where Clough compares Leeds to Hell--that Clough (and perhaps Britain itself, given the way he is tied to Thatcher) is among the damned. It's an interesting way of elevating the sports novel to the level of social history.

Edited by NBooth, 07 January 2012 - 04:26 PM.

[NBooth]

"After the Disaster, Before the Disaster"

Quote

To mark the anniversary of the Fukushima catastrophe on 11 March last year, David Peace has written a story about the 1923 Japanese earthquake

First paragraph or so:

Quote

In an emergency such as this earthquake, art is useless, to say the least. Our recent experience only helped expose the ultimate futility of all artistic endeavours.
– Ruminations on the Earthquake,
Kikuchi Kan, 1923

After the disaster, Ryunosuke lived for four more years.

Before the disaster, Ryunosuke had been in his study in his home in Tabata, in the north of Tokyo. Throughout the morning, there had been brief showers and a strong wind while Ryunosuke read newspaper reports on the formation of a new cabinet under Count Yamamoto. Just before noon, he had finished the last article and lit a cigarette when he felt a slight vibration. Moments later, his house was shaking to an extraordinary degree and Ryunosuke could hear tiles falling from the roof above him and his family screaming from other rooms below him. But the shaking did not subside, as was usual, and the motion continued to intensify. Ryunosuke put out his cigarette. He tried to stand but the floor tilted and rolled again beneath his feet, so he was forced to sit back down at his desk. Then, at last, the waves of shocks seemed to lessen and Ryunosuke could finally stand and join his family outside in the garden.

The story is part of an anthology called March was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown.

[NBooth]

The Independent: "Damned United author David Peace to pen Bill Shankly novel."

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Today, Peace’s publishers Faber and Faber announced that, after a series of novels based in Japan, Peace will be returning to write about English football with a novel about legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly.

According to the linked announcement, this novel's due in August, and the last book in the Tokyo Trilogy will come after that.

Here's Peace on why he's writing about Shankly:

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I have written about corruption, I've written about crime, I've written about bad men and I've written about the demons. But now I've had enough of the bad men and the demons. Now I want to write about a good man. And a saint. A Red Saint. Bill Shankly was not just a great football manager. Bill Shankly was one of the greatest men who ever lived. And the supporters of Liverpool Football Club, and the people of Liverpool the city, know that and remember him. But many people outside of football, outside of Liverpool, do not know or do not remember him. And now – more than ever – it's time everybody knew about Bill Shankly. About what he achieved, about what he believed. And how he led his life. Not for himself, for other people.

Edited by NBooth, 15 January 2013 - 04:55 PM.

[NBooth]

NBooth, on 15 January 2013 - 04:47 PM, said:

The Independent: "Damned United author David Peace to pen Bill Shankly novel."

August 15

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Looking ahead to Red or Dead’s publication, Faber’s Lee Brackstone said: “A novel about one of the great good men of British football comes as such a tonic and a wake-up call in these days of extraordinary wealth, privilege and abuse of power in the Premier League. There quite simply could not be a better time, culturally and politically, for this novel.”

--so, again, they're emphasizing that this book, of all of Peace's novels, is about a good man--and the idea is that narratives of good people can work for political and cultural change. Which is an interesting direction for Peace to take, considering none of his books (with the possible exception of GB84, unread by me) actually feature ethically good characters; indeed, part of the point of those books is that everyone is corrupted. [Then again, perhaps they're trying to avoid the outrage that came about when Peace wrote The Damned Utd]

Edited by NBooth, 21 May 2013 - 01:14 PM.