On a freezing Manchester morning, I huddle inside on a Zoom call with David Peace, author of Munichs, in light of it being shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. Munichs is a novel about the 1958 Munich air disaster, which killed twenty people, among them eight of Manchester United’s ‘Busby Babes’ football squad. It is a novel about how a whole city responds to tragedy, utilising numerous perspectives including the survivors and the families of the dead. Peace connects with me from a slightly less freezing Tokyo evening, where he has lived for around a decade.
I begin by congratulating him on Munichs being shortlisted for the prize, adding that I thought he should have won it. “So did my mother!” he laughs, adding that he feels flattered to have even made the longlist. “My impression was that the William Hill award didn’t take novels… there were so many other really good books… Munichs is a novel and it’s not even entirely about sport.”
Football is something Peace has returned to multiple times, with 2006’s The Damned United and 2013’s Red or Dead, the former of which was made into a film in 2009. “I thought that one day I would write another football book, and I thought there was a big chance it would be about Manchester United, but I wasn’t really sure what period or when, exactly”.
He goes on to detail how the book was a point of connection between himself and his late father, who died the month before he began writing Munichs. “The Munich Air Disaster was something which had had a big effect on him and he talked to me about it a lot growing up. My original plan was to write a book of short stories about Manchester United going from the disaster in ‘58 through to when they were relegated in 1974. I started out with that intention, and that was the book I pitched to Faber, but quite quickly, I realised there was a lot I didn’t know, and a lot more to it than a short story”.
I point out that the novel reads quite episodically, with alternating voices and perspective. Peace says that he “wanted to have as many different voices as possible to show the scope of the disaster and also how that disaster affected people in so many different ways”. He describes it as a “polyphonic-voiced novel” that is “anchor[ed] with some recurring characters”.
Peace also mentions a moment about a quarter of the way through the novel where Neil Berry, the young son of United winger Johnny Berry, is sent away to his aunt’s house whilst his father recovers in hospital: “That actually is a kind of standalone, you could read that as a short story if you wanted to. So there’s vignettes within the book”.
We move on to discuss the research process that went into Munichs. During his talk at Manchester Literature Festival, which I also reviewed, Peace discussed the role that reading contemporary newspapers has on his research. He describes how “the first thing I do is really work out the time frame and so I knew it was going to go from just before the crash to May when they reach the FA cup final”. This then led him to conduct his research in the National Diet Library in Tokyo, where he was able to read old copies of the Times “to get a sense of the time”.
Peace points out that although newspapers are a “distortion of the time,” they are “most useful for… stuff like the weather, and how much things cost, and what was on the TV and the radio and what was on at the cinema, the texture of the time really”.
In addition to newspapers, Peace also emphasises the usefulness of autobiographies and especially documentaries to “[find] the voices of people, to try and replicate how they spoke within the text”. The role these documentaries and biographies played in the formation of the text is reinforced by the bibliography at the back of the book, something somewhat unusual for a fiction text but that serves to remind us all of the truth at the heart of Munichs.
Later on he says that he is always “[trying] to literally bring them back to life in the text, to resurrect them as they were”. This is especially important for giving voice to those who died in the crash, but equally for those who survived, where it is vital to “imagine what that situation would have felt like”.
I ask which were his favourite perspectives in the novel were to write; Peace answers with Jimmy Murphy, the assistant manager who held the club together in the aftermath of the crash. Peace describes him as “a central character of the story and such a combustible character, a man who deeply loved the players and would do anything for them, a man in grief but also, the person who has to carry the club on. He’s got quite a fiery temper and a sense of humour”.
Murphy’s presence in the book brings the novel constantly forward, alongside other more challenging perspectives to write, such as manager Matt Busby who spends most of the novel bed-bound, or the parents of Duncan Edwards, who tragically died weeks after the crash. It’s a novel full of heartbreak, which makes the centrality of figures such as Murphy all the more important.
We also discuss Peace’s style, as his usage of long, lyrical sentences is very distinct. He tells me it’s all about rhythm, as well as how the words look on the page. Illustrating his writing process, he says, “I write in longhand first, and then I read it aloud and make corrections, then I type it up, then I print it off and read it aloud, and I do this multiple times. The reading aloud is the most important part because I’m trying to get the rhythm of the text right.”
He goes on to talk about a George Orwell essay which states that the first step in writing should be to delay it as long as possible, build the scene in your head as clearly as you can and then convey that to the page. Peace has this advice printed on his office walls. It’s easy to see this in the incredibly visual writing of the novel, full of haunting, striking imagery.
Later, we go on to discuss the role of Manchester in the novel, as a book full of distinct places and street names familiar to us all – Hulme, Oxford Road and Fallowfield to name a few. We come to the fun realisation that I now live near exactly where he did in Longsight in the 90s. Peace says he “tracked down second-hand copies of mapbooks and so forth, and old books of photographs of Manchester at the time, and in a way there’s a part of it that is a love letter to Manchester, and a city in mourning”. He frames it as a way of putting the players back in the time and place in which they once lived.
Munichs will likely not his final novel about Manchester United, with his original aims of following the club through to 1974 not fully complete. He hopes to make a spiritual sequel to Munichs, whilst making it different enough to not be a direct sequel. I, for one, am very excited.
We end with a short discussion of my thoughts on the book. I tell him that although I am not a football fan, I still found the novel engaging and emotive. He takes that as a compliment and says he is “hoping that people who are not interested in football will read it”. I would agree with that – it is an essential read, bursting with such love for Manchester that it’s hard not to warm to it.
