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On February 6, 1958, the Manchester United football team was on its way home from a European Cup match when their plane crashed on takeoff from Munich-Riem Airport. 23 of the 44 people on board were killed, including eight United players, three staff members and eight sports journalists. The Munich air disaster was a decisive moment in English football history; it has been the subject of numerous non-fiction books and documentaries – and now, thanks to David Peace, a novel.
Peace has made it his mission to transform real events into fiction. In his Red Riding novels (1999–2002) he describes crime and corruption in his native Yorkshire. GB84 (2004) again looked at the miners’ strike of 1984–1985; The damned united (2006) and Red or dead (2013) were character studies of legendary football managers Brian Clough and Bill Shankly. These works typically follow a formula: a well-researched factual framework is embellished with novelistic flourishes and a dash of artistic license. Peace is a rarity in literary publishing: a true crossover success that introduces readers of true crime, social histories and sports biographies to the joys of well-written narrative.
Munich takes up this formula. Peace draws heavily on the existing literature on the subject – cited in a four-page bibliography in the acknowledgments – and recounts the Munich tragedy and its aftermath in a third-person chronological narrative, interspersed with loving portraits of victims and survivors and occasional first-person monologues. There are stirring scenes at hospital bedsides, detailed descriptions of funeral processions, snippets of real media interviews and dream sequences. It culminates in a bittersweet climax when a ragtag United team, cobbled together from emergency signings and inexperienced young players (“a fragile thing of plasters and prayers, this team of straw and hope”) manages to reach the FA Cup final at Wembley just three months after the disaster.
Manchester United manager Matt Busby was hospitalised in Munich for around ten weeks after the accident, leaving his assistant Jimmy Murphy to temporarily take charge of the team. Murphy was a modest Welshman who avoided the limelight; here he is the embodiment of grace in extreme situations, doing his job with stubborn dignity and a quiet sense of duty. The film’s villains are the gawking paparazzi: at one point photographers storm into Busby’s hospital room and swarm around him, “flashbulbs popping… blinding the injured man with their sudden bright white flashes in his eyes as he fights for his life”.
The cathartic atmosphere at the club’s first trip to Munich, a home match against Sheffield Wednesday, is powerfully conveyed, and there are many poignant moments. When the body of winger Eddie Colman – who was just 21 when he died in Munich – is brought to his family home, “his dog ran in, ran right under the table and sat under the coffin”. The inner lives of the characters are a lightly sketched portrait of grief and despair. A young Bobby Charlton feels guilty for surviving the crash, as does Busby, who brought United into European competition in the first place.
Peace has toned down his trademark prose style, built on the heavy, evocative repetition of words and phrases. But the penchant for mesmerism remains, whether in the relentless meteorological observations (“the cold, damp morning”; “the rain, the pouring rain”; “the pouring, endless, biting, vicious rain”) or in the frequent, almost infantile use of intensifiers to heighten pathos: “the hour was late, so very late, and the night so cold, so wet, so very cold and wet”; the voice of a well-wisher “seemed so far away, so very far away”; an injured sports reporter recovering in hospital “felt so lonely, so awfully, awfully lonely”.
This can feel like paint-by-numbers, but it’s oddly effective, giving the novel a unified and relatively unobtrusive narrative structure. Peace’s achievement here is largely a feat of information management – synthesizing all this pre-existing material into a single text. One wonders whether it might be possible – soon, if not already – to create such a work using artificial intelligence. But there’s artistry here, too, in the author’s sensitive weighting of tone and timbre, and the elegant simplicity of the dialogue. The story itself, of course, is inherently compelling on a human level: young lives cruelly ended; the decimation of a popular and exceptionally talented team; the club’s subsequent rebuilding, driven by a wave of emotion.
Munich succeeds not so much as a literary novel as it does as a work of high-quality fan fiction. And why not? The novelistic treatment makes for a more intense reading experience than conventional journalistic reporting. Nostalgic readers will enjoy being transported to Britain in the late 1950s – a time heavily romanticised in English football culture, when players and clubs had stronger ties to their local communities than they do today. Peace’s understated portrayal of this background – rich in allusion, in passing references to Rupert Bear yearbooks, toy marbles and Pathé newsreels – has an implicitly plaintive quality, and this story of sporting tragedy is also an elegy for a society’s lost innocence.
Munich by David Peace Faber £20/WW Norton $29.99, 480 pages
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