The Damned Utd

This book, a fictionally-embellished-sort-of-biographical thing that is probably best to call a novel by David Peace, was surprisingly compelling. I encountered it in Oxfam at the end of November and took three months to read the first third or so, and upon resuming got so gripped that I finished it during a long bus journey. Anyway: the novel is based on the infamous 1970's football manager Brian Clough's forty-four day stint as manager of Leeds United.* As someone with an interest in football that only marginally counts as existent and generally not liking biographical works much, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it. How wrong I was.

   The novel follows two narrative threads, flickering between Clough's present managing Leeds to a snippetted walkthrough of his past (from his premature retirement as a player due to injury, into his managing career alongside Peter Taylor through Hartlepools, Derby County, Brighton and up to Leeds). Arranged in 44 chapters for each of his days at Leeds, these backstory parts are recurrent throughout and quite hard to get used to. Also hard to get used to is the writing style itself - David Peace has cultivated an extremely distinctive voice for Brian's interior narration (the present is 1st person, the past is 2nd, all Clough-centric) that is both down-to-earth and entrenchedly arrogant. Particular phrases and memories and images recur and repeat; people and places are almost always referred to by exact full name; past and present dialogues and experiences echo and intermingle in the head of the narrating Clough. The style perfectly fits the mindset of someone paranoid about their competitors, obsessed by their successes, haunted by their failures, and entirely sure of their own way of achieving their ends.

   And this is the kind of character Clough is painted as, impeccably and engrossingly so. The 2006 novel was published two years after its central character's real-life death and was not met kindly by his surviving friends and family, who protested the portrayal of him, and probably rightly so. But if it had been toned down it would have been just another biography [see *], and yet David Peace takes the facts of Clough's management career (which actually do seem well-researched) and chooses to give them the artistic slant that turns them into literature. Brian is certainly exaggerated as an anti-hero, his words and deeds and relationships certainly tinged with a particular sourness and viciousness that they probably lacked in reality, but as far as it takes the novel this is well worth it. The character study central to the novel is not so much Brian Clough himself but a black-and-white caricature of him, which clashes so spectacularly with visions of victory and defeat that it itself carries the novel, and only a character with as much tormented depth as the Clough painted herein ever could.

   That's why the novel is so compelling, even for those with little or no interest in football. In fact disregard football altogether - if you come to this book loving the sport you might be annoyed at how subservient of a place it takes to the central threads of the narrative. Be aware that football is obsession that has driven the compulsions, the hopes and despairs, of this novel's protagonist - and he is what it's about. If you don't mind a lot of swearing and a repetitive style of prose which is quite hard to settle into, then this book is definitely one to read. An excellent exploration of a darkened character.

* yes, based. Many of the complaints I've seen in reviews and general reactions to the novel have been that it's full of added details and speculations and characterful flourishes that distort the facts, but David Peace makes it very clear that his work is a novel, "another fiction, based on another fact" - not to be taken as pure history. The additions are what weld it into a powerful epic rather than being a dry overview of an egoistic Northumbrian's management career, which it otherwise would be.

William Shakespeare's Star Wars

This book, it should probably be said immediately, isn't an actual work of the Bard, but a product of fantastic enthusiasm for both Shakespearean theatre and George Lucas' classic trilogy on part of Ian Doescher, who deserves an enormous amount of credit despite the entire thing being a mishmash of plagiarised content and style. Before I start talking about it though I want to thank my dear housemate Chris Hedges for leaving this book on the coffee table, and apologise to him for my temporary theft of it. You can have it back now.

   The book - what is there to say? For any fan of Shakespeare (I am) or fan of Star Wars (I also am), it's truly marvellous, a playful amalgamation of the sublime scripted style of the one and the powerful punchy plot of the other. Doescher has done an amazing job of converting the entire of Episode IV: A New Hope into iambic pentameter, complete with archaic wordage* and all the classic to-be-expected tropes of someone spoofing Shakespeare (straightforward phrases turned amusingly into poetic spurts of "verily", "forsooth" and so on).

   Moreover he goes the extra mile to inject theatrical colour and character into this already excellent story: while the plot remains exactly the same, with Luke and Han and C3PO and R2D2 and Leia and Obi-Wan and Chewbacca and Vader et al, he foresaw that the book's primary (or probably only) readers would be people familiar with both Shakespeare and Star Wars anyway. Taking advantage of this, the play (it's written as a playscript so yes I can call it that) is littered with half-quotes from Shakespeare's plays, and full of references both forwards and backwards within the Star Wars saga; perhaps the best added element though are the occasional [aside] monologues, that allow by dint of stage direction the characters to voice their thoughts and feelings in things that are implied but never said in the films (because monologues aren't dialogues so weren't in the film). These often give surprisingly poignant insights into the mindsets and intentions of the characters, especially those of Darth Vader, R2D2 and Han Solo. Well, R2D2's are just funny, but the others definitely show a lot of depth through these parts.

   The illustrations are definitely worth a mention too. The characters are easily recognisable but styled in as close to 16th century dress as their costumes can go - rendering Stormtroopers in suits of armour, Grand Moff Tarkin in a full lace ruff, and Jabba the Hutt with a feathered Jacobean cap. I can't say a great deal about them because by convention of clichéd wisdom it takes 1000 words to describe a single picture sufficiently, and I can't be bothered to write that much. They're hilarious though.

   I think probably the most enjoyable part of it was how easily it worked. Yes, Star Wars has a great story, and yes, Shakespearean English is an immediately recognisable form of writing, but to bring the two together and mesh them well enough that even the overlaps can be filled in believably and the whole read with casual bursts of mirth is an achievement indeed. If you like Shakespeare and Star Wars even a bit, you'll share my appreciation for this brilliantly quirky combination of the two.

* speaking of wordage, it must be remembered that many of the characters in the films don't even speak English at all - and where they do not, Doescher has transcribed their vocal output. Every consonant-dense garbled utterance in the Tattooine language of Jabba and Greedo, every harsh vowel-burp of the Jawas, every beep, meep, whistle, squeak, whee and whoo of R2D2; these are all written down and nonsensically fun to read.

Ulysses

This book, James Joyce's seminal masterwork of obscurely innovative writing, has a literary reputation preceding it like almost no other book. It's notorious for being just downright difficult to read, and so having been informed as such by my A-Level English Language teacher (who as this blog goes on it will become obvious had a huge influence on my reading habits) I found it in a second-hand bookshop and started reading it out of sheer determination. That was two years ago (I read many books simultaneously and the longer harder ones get finished very slowly as a consequence), but having barely read anything in January due to exams I decided to tackle the remaining-unread 300ish pages in another burst of effort and so finished it just in time for the next term to recommence tomorrow. The book's general gist[s] is[are]:

• Leopold Bloom, a jewish advertisement editor, goes about the events of his day on 16th June 1904, encountering and interacting with many friends and acquaintances, primarily his wife, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the son of an old friend. Within the book's twenty-four hour span these three characters go about their varyingly mundane days in Dublin, doing things from attending funerals to regretting affairs to surprisedly discovering a forgotten potato in one's pocket. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE BECAUSE
• It's also a parody/homage of Homer's Odyssey* (hence the title), with each succession of events vaguely mirroring a chapter of the Greek epic, albeit in necessarily less dramatic scope; for example, where Odysseus and his crew are captured and attacked by the Cyclops, Bloom and his friends are accosted by a drunk nationalist who throws a biscuit-tin at our not-eponymous-hero. BUT IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE EITHER BECAUSE
• Joyce was a pioneer of prose, experimenting with writing techniques throughout the book which I will not embarrass my lack of literature-jargon by failing to explain; and so the language with which the story unfolds is almost endlessly diversely immersively unpredictably obtusely brilliantly creative. The prose dips and flickers almost without warning between dialogues, descriptions, perceptions, memories, thoughts, current occurrences and odd half-metaphorical fantasies. The three main characters' heads are entered to a remarkably personal extent, with their streams of consciousness often played out in grand strings of idiosyncratic wordage. Chapters even vary between the genre and form of their written style - one interspersed with sensationalist newspaper headlines describing updating situations, one composed entirely from questions and answers of varying length, one written as a script replete with amusing stage directions, one written as a single fifty-page-long sentence without any punctuation at all. This is what people are talking about when complaining of how hard to read it is BECAUSE IT'S NOT QUITE THAT SIMPLE.

   So the book, despite a fairly simple story and a fairly comprehensible set of mythic parallels, becomes nigh on impenetrable because of how it is written. Of course it helps not at all that on top of this the text is also littered with references to contemporary Irish culture, often in minute detail of politics or communities, plus spattered untranslated phrases in Latin, Italian, Irish and a handful of other languages, plus many a word that is simply either misspelt or made up. Much of these latter difficulties could be avoided with an annotated version (which I didn't have) but that adds on a good 240 pages of reading and probably doesn't add 240-pages-worth of enjoyment, so allow yourself to not understand certain things. I think in short it's fair to say that there was a pretty large proportion of the book that was lost on me, and could probably be lost on anyone except those highly-skilled in literary deconstruction and with a lot of spare time for analysis.

   Don't let that put you off in the slightest. This is renowned as one of the most difficult books but it is also absolutely superb: the rewards are so much greater for the increased mental strain of reading it. If they weren't, the first person to have read it would have considered it meaningless gibberish and tossed it aside and it wouldn't be the monstrously famous 20th-century novel that it is. Reading it is often like wading through glue, yes, but only because you're collecting pots of gold scattered about the surface of the glue-pond (please pardon that ridiculous sentence). The sheer liquid delight of the writing style's inventiveness as the words seem to play with themselves, the life-affirming splendour of some of the descriptions of feelings and people, the irrepressible grin or chortle as some benign or opaque phrase turns its own meaning into something entirely different - once you get the knack of not being put off by the text, you can stumble through it and see its fleeting beauty. This post is naturally meandering somewhat because there is so much to potentially say about this book and yet I wouldn't know where to start, so apologies. I'm just trying to outline how great it was to read.

   On the back of my edition, there's a quote by Samuel Beckett about the novel: "His words are not the polite contortions of twentieth century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and flame and disappear". I cannot put it better; reading the book makes you feel as though you are reading minds, and of course this is hard to comprehend, to retain, to dissect; but it is full of insights and snippets of pure originality and excellence. Molly and Stephen and especially Leopold Bloom do not feel like characters in a novel - they feel like real existing humans with minds and bodies and communities; like we're allowed to peer into their innermost lives through James Joyce's meticulously** crafted prose-tinted glasses.

   It is a cliché to say so but this is a work of genius (it wouldn't be a cliché if people hadn't thought it were true frequently enough to make it one). There aren't many books I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who enjoys reading should attempt before they die, but this is certainly among them.

* I did start off trying to read Ulysses and the Odyssey in parallel, chapter to chapter, but of course the one was an epic journey with monsters and adventures in plain prose and the other was a day in Dublin with acquaintances and errands in the unplainest prose I've ever encountered - and for some reason I got bored of the first one and finished the second one first.

** the book had a thoroughly arduous journey from inception to proper publication, due to various factors including: Joyce's povety-stricken conditions; his developing eye-disease; inept copytypists; disinterested publishers; government censorship; and World War One. The pains of a genius' labours are great to birth such a great work as this. Fortunately the original text survives to today in a variety of affordable readable mass-market paperbacks.