Books & Poetry

David Peace has a thing about Yorkshire. His first four books were a quartet of increasing complexity about the Yorkshire Ripper. Then came ‘GB84’, a dazzling study of the miners’ strike set in Sheffield. Now ‘The Damned Utd’ takes on that bastion of Yorkshire belligerence, Leeds United, seen through the eyes of the county’s bastard offspring, Brian Clough. This is a departure of sorts. After all, serious writers don’t do football. They write books about Henry James, or what it’s like to be Mohammed Atta or a suffocatingly self-satisfied brain surgeon. But football is off limits, despite the fertile appeal. Why was Peace prepared to buck the trend?

‘Most novels tend to be about things that aren’t really interesting, so I wanted to write a book about something I’m interested in,’ he says with unabashed directness, down the phone from his home in Tokyo. ‘And since I’ve been seven, the two things I’ve been interested in are football and pop. It’s strange, the number of writers I know who are fascinated by these two subjects, and yet the novels don’t exist. People view it as fans, particularly people like me who were completely inept at both, and therefore don’t feel qualified to write about it.’He’s on to something. BS Johnson and Julian Barnes both wrote about football, but specifically from the viewpoint of fans. Writers otherwise prepared to inhabit the skin of people of almost any gender, nationality or occupation shy from fictionalising football. Feature continues

‘There’s this air of mystery, that if you’ve not played, you’re not qualified to talk about it,’ Peace continues. ‘But I’ve written loads of books about coppers and I’m not a copper and nobody says anything. I’ve spent my life listening to how football people talk, so I found it quite easy to put myself in Clough’s shoes.’

Peace’s Clough is a conflicted, bitter soul, his Yorkshire an angry, unhappy place. The story unfolds over the torrid 44 days Clough managed Leeds in 1974, when they were the most successful club in the land and he the most talented manager. In a key early scene, Clough holds his first team meeting, which involves telling each player in turn why he hates them and the club they play for. Bile foments bile.