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.
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