BWhy the plural? There is only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the muddy runway where British European Airways Flight 609 crashes on February 6, 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spend their first confused night; the hospital where their fellow passengers recover – or don’t. This is clearly the story of an accident, a moment in time, a team: the plane crash that killed 23 of 44 passengers, including eight Manchester United players, three staff members and eight journalists.

But Peace’s argument is clear across the several hundred pages of this unsparing, electrifying and harrowing novel. The Munich air disaster, which was so crucial to the development of the football club and had such a profound impact on the city, the north of England, the sporting community and the country, might not have happened if the takeoff had been aborted. And what would the world look like then?

Like many of Peace’s works, Munichs is an obsessional study of ghost history; not just the idea that the past lives with us, but that multiple futures do. In extreme situations, time seems to stop, but in reality it lurches along regardless, bringing with it, in this case, a grotesque juxtaposition of funerals and games. What is the value, then, of the victory over Red Star Belgrade that sent the team abroad?

The novel’s modus operandi is also a juxtaposition, with voices and scenes seemingly merging into one another, marked by tonal shifts that the disorientated reader notices as soon as they occur and which consistently catch him off guard. Here, Cissie Charlton, mother of Bobby and Jackie, is filled with a sense of doom before Bobby, the second of her four sons, is in danger. She calls Old Trafford from a phone box and later returns there to take calls, answer letters and make endless cups of her “special tea”.

There is Jimmy Murphy, taking the reins of manager while Matt Busby lies seriously ill in hospital, galvanising the remaining teams, calling clubs to find replacements and weeping over his rosary in his bedroom at Whalley Range. There are the devastated landladies gathering together the belongings of the deceased young players who had been staying with them, the taxi drivers offering free rides to survivors, the children fighting over tickets for the rest of the season.

In the novel’s constant present, time is relative: at Old Trafford, events accelerate as the sporting calendar demands choices that no one is prepared to make, caught up in the far more demanding and endless schedule of grief. Before it even seems possible, signs of waning sympathy begin to take hold, with the club being insidiously accused of mobilising sentimentality and exploiting it. Meanwhile, the hospital patients watch the minutes of each day tick by, tormented by the guilt of having made it and, in Busby’s case, when he finally realises the extent of the disaster, by agonising thoughts that there were players he might as well have left at home.

What elevates Munichs beyond the mere recital of an event so often discussed and commemorated that it has acquired almost mythological status is Peace’s dogged devotion to the particular. The range of registers he employs is incredible: he could move from a bird’s eye view of Cabra, the Dublin suburb to which the body of Liam ‘Billy’ Whelan is being transferred, to a meeting of ruthless flight inspectors before plunging into a match report delivered in sports journalistic parlance. He can cast one eye over a rain-soaked funeral procession – the weather is a different character for most of the time – and then enter the mind of a player wondering if he will, or wants to, ever kick a ball again.

And he is also reticent about recounting moments that seem to defy close scrutiny. This is especially true of the account of the death of left runner Duncan Edwards two weeks after the accident, which he describes from a distance through the agonizing vigil of his family and the serious attention of the medical staff.

Peace’s account implicitly contains the knowledge of where we find ourselves today: as spectators of a global industry of extraordinary, obscene wealth, run by television networks and governing bodies that often seem to have contempt for the spirit and history of the game. The tones he strikes again and again in hypnotic, metronymic prose could seem false, sentimental, nostalgic – the declarations of camaraderie, triumph over tragedy, glory meant to bring honor to the men he consistently refers to as “The Dead” – were they not tempered by the knowledge of what comes after.

As in his two previous football novels, The Damned Utd and Red or Dead, Peace’s attempts to parse the complex cultural, geographical and historical significance of the sport are inextricably linked to what interests him about masculinity, citizenship and nationhood. All three books are aware of the intersection of personal, social and environmental psychology, and all are convinced that the unusual – the outrageous characters of Brian Clough and Bill Shankly, the randomness of a terrible accident – can reveal something about our shared beliefs and inclinations.

Peace has explained that Munich was written after the death of his father, who had advised him to focus on the events of February 1958 and on Jimmy Murphy, a reluctant limelight dweller who proves to be one of the novel’s central and most compelling aspects. Here, too, there is a need to understand what has preoccupied those closest to us, especially when we have no direct access to it. Peace, born in 1967, experienced these events and their wider context only as a memory and retelling, to which he has now, valuably and bravely, added his own.