Next year is the 40th anniversary of Bill Shankly’s retirement as manager of Liverpool Football Club. When he stepped down, after the 1974 season, Shankly had succeeded in his life’s work of taking a football club in a declining docklands city and reshaping it in his own broadly socialist vision. He had worked and preached and coached until the people’s club had become not just the best club in England but also the irreplaceable voice and spirit and wit of its city. His parting gift was a team ready to embark on a wave of unprecedented domestic and European success – and a series of dry, Scottish one-liners now engraved into the football lexicon.
Despite a comically solemn approach to fitness – he predated Jane Fonda as the ultimate health nut by a full decade – Shankly died in 1981 at the relatively young age of 68. So he was spared the disgrace of Heysel and the catastrophe of Hillsborough and the gradual transformation of English football into a global franchise and a stock-market toy.
David Peace's comprehensive and painstakingly detailed journey through Shankly's obsession with Liverpool Football Club marks a return to the territory he has uniquely claimed as his own: the mindset and feel of northern England in the 1970s and 1980s. The book is a natural companion to The Damned United (2006), his lauded and controversial fictional portrait of Brian Clough's doomed 44-day period in charge of Leeds. While Clough is presented as a flamboyant football savant battling demons real and imagined, the Bill Shankly dreamed up by Peace is altogether more secure in his world view. But like Clough he was eccentric, like Clough he was lonely, and like Clough he was haunted by football.
Peace’s customary motifs of style are all present: the repetitions, the incantatory prose, the staccato sentences. So too is the uncanny, magical knack he has for summoning the atmosphere of that time in a way that more acclaimed and pointedly literary writers cannot match. He uses none of the usual devices, such as period or pop-cultural references, but still transports us back to the 1970s as the reader follows Shankly – referred to as “Bill” throughout the 15 years when he moved only between his kitchen, the bedroom he shared with Ness, the training ground, the great football stadiums of England and Europe and the occasional reluctant holiday in Blackpool.
As Peace presents it, Shankly’s life was as localised as anything presented in the dramas of Shelagh Delaney except that on Saturday afternoons he became a mortal god. If we read once about how Shankly liked to set the breakfast table the night before – “Bill opened the pantry door. Bill took out a jar of honey and a jar of marmalade. Bill walked back to the table” – then we read it a dozen times. The point is that Shankly’s glory was achieved through the perfection and repetition of small tasks such as cleaning the oven or passing a football.
Red or Dead weighs in at 720 pages: the Faber editors must have gulped in astonishment at the volume of repeated scenes and sentences. It will infuriate some readers, but as with all of Peace's fictions on England the gathering effect has a strange and lulling power.
Christmas turkey
Red or Dead is also a disconcerting dive into the football culture of the 1970s, still distinctly postwar in its ethos and simplicity. One of several wonderful blackly comic scenes has a fuming Ian St John, dropped from the first team after a glittering career, challenging Shankly about the smaller turkey he received from the club at Christmas. (It is doubtful that Luis Suarez has ever pondered the symbolism of his courtesy turkey.) St John – correctly – took it as a sign that he was finished at the club.
As always in Peace’s world, fact and fiction blur: he includes the entire text of a long interview (you can see it on YouTube) that Shankly gave to Scottish television on the street near his house. Almost incidentally, the book is also a terrific portrait of a touchingly formal but devoted marriage, and at its heart is the vision of Shankly as the great unacknowledged socialist of English life, wedded to Clement Atlee’s vision of how things should be. (A radio interview Shankly conducted with Harold Wilson is also included in full.)
Peace set out his stall with his wonderfully strange and provocative quartet of Yorkshire novels – 1974, 1977, 1980, 1983 – which depicted police corruption and the Yorkshire Ripper in a rich, rain-soaked Gothic nightmare with nary a mention of Coronation Street. GB84, a ferocious reprise of the Yorkshire miner's strike, has the same haunted paranoia. Peace frequently stands accused of laying the darkness on thick. And he does. But so did Emily Brontë. Maybe it has something to do with Yorkshire. Together, Peace's books on England – he is completing the last of a Japanese trilogy that make his English fictions seem cosy – are blisteringly original and memorable.
Now Shankly is resurrected as a saviour, a moral and wholly reliable patriarch in the midst of the shadows and macabre deeds and bleak houses that populate those earlier books on northern England. Clough even makes a cameo, respectful of Shankly to the last.
This sometimes mad and sometimes beautiful book suggests that, just like his latest subject, David Peace is constructing a legacy that will live on after many others have withered.
