Red or Dead

March 31, 2014
Here’s a tough sell for an American reading audience: a challenging, 700-plus-pager about a very successful English football club manager, based on a true story. About that “challenging” thing—the book is challenging, but not in a footnoted, stories-within-stories, tricky postmodern kind of way. No, this is an endurance test.
Bill Shankly, the man this novel is about, is one of the great football managers of all time. (I’m going to refer to football as football here, and not soccer—because that’s how it is in the book, and also “soccer” sounds like something children play.) He took over an ailing Liverpool Football Club in 1959 and over the next 15 years raised the team up from the scummy backwaters of lower-tier English football and turned it into a trophy-winning powerhouse. How did he do it?
Repetition, repetition, repetition. In life, in training, in everything. This becomes painfully apparent very early on in the novel, as Peace sets up the narrative and stylistic scaffolding. Short sentences. Repetitive sentences. A wholesale chucking of even the faintest notion of elegant prose. Indeed, this book is made of a forest’s worth of wooden sentences. Seasons are methodically recapped match by match in choppy bursts: “In the third minute, Ian St. John scored. In the fifty-fifth minute, Roger Hunt scored. In the sixty-fifth minute, Alan A’Court scored. And four minutes later Hunt scored again. And Liverpool Football Club beat Manchester City four-one.” Here’s a blip from another random page: “Bill dried his hands. Bill picked up the tea towel. Bill dried up the pans. Bill dried up the plates. Bill dried up the knives and forks. Bill put the pans in one cupboard. Bill put the plates in another.” (This goes on for a while, and is not the only time Bill does the dishes.)
At several points I nearly put the book down, having plowed through another 100 pages that were more or less the same as the 100 pages that had preceded them. But I didn’t. Because Peace every now and again figures out a way to smuggle in a bit of actual human emotion—and having finished the book, I can’t figure out how he managed that. At one point, Liverpool is once again dumped out of Europe, and I felt crushed. Another season, Liverpool misses out on the league title, and I was legitimately bummed for Bill.
I have a lot of gripes about the book. Bill is too much a saint; after he retires, the book becomes a series of situations for Bill to stumble into and act selflessly. His wife is a one-dimensional phantom of ceaseless nicety. Massive chunks of the narrative could be lopped off (a 20-plus-page reproduction of a radio interview springs immediately to mind). Pretty much everyone has the same stilted speech pattern. But for all of the book’s faults, it’s hard not to admire its hubris. There is nothing else at all like it out there, and there are some nerdy delights to be found in reading this if you’ve also read Peace’s other football novel, The Damned Utd, about another famous football manager, Brian Clough. But if ever there were a case where you love the idea of something much more than the actual something, then this is it.
Jonathan Segura is the executive editor of Publishers Weekly. His writing has appeared in GQ, NPR, and The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (HMH).

Starred review from March 15, 2014
A story of faith, ambition, socialism and a last-place English football club, combining a true story with eternal truths. English novelist Peace is no stranger to mixing fiction with the football pitch (The Damned UTD, 2006, etc.), and in this volume he tells the story of elegant and elegiac Bill Shankly, the legendary coach of the Liverpool Football Club who took a down-and-out team in a down-and-out town to the top ranks of English football. (You could think of him as a sort of British Joe Torre for the way he's revered by fans.) This book is barely fiction--it's more a fictionalized biography--but it's a classic story about dedication, redemption and love, all set in a locker room and in football stadiums where tens of thousands, sometimes more, chant and cheer. It's a story about struggle--against wind, rain, snow and mud; against Arsenal Football Club and Sportgemeinschaft Dynamo Dresden and UD Las Palmas; against a tradition of failure; against the limits of athletes and ownership. But it's above all a story of triumph--over other clubs, to be sure, but also over obstacles moral and financial--and a story about passage: one man's (from the coal mines of Scotland), and one team's (from the depths of the Second Division to the giddy heights of the First). Across its pages stride some of the greatest names in English sport, unknown on these shores but luminaries in Liverpool--and a cameo appearance by Harold Wilson, the one-time British prime minister. The result is a book to be savored with a cup of tea and a slice of orange--what the Liverpool players have at halftime. A novel without a single quote in 736 fast-paced pages--but one that might be quoted for decades.

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Starred review from April 15, 2014
A 700-page, experimental novel about the coach of an English soccer team? A limited audience pretty much guarantees this won't be a best-seller, which is a bloody shameit's a magnificent literary achievement. Peace, the respected British novelist who also wrote The Damned Utd (2006), about the short, controversial tenure of Brian Clough at Leeds United (adapted into a fine film starring Michael Sheen), here tackles Bill Shankly, the legendary man who, from 1959 to1974, transformed Liverpool Football Club from an also-ran into a modern-day powerhouse. Peace's prose is at first daunting: weaving a dense tapestry of short, declarative sentences, he builds each scene with painstaking, poetic repetition. Whole scenes are repeated with minor variationand, needless to say, he leaves out quotation marks. (Commas are also in short supply.) But, training session by training session, and game by game (seemingly every game he managed for Liverpool), the pummeling repetition achieves a profoundly powerful effect, like an incantation, bringing to life Shankly's relentless drive, his committed socialism, his near saintly concern for the fansand rendering his rudderless retirement all the more poignant. Peace is clearly an admirer, and no matter which team you support, it will be hard to remain unmoved.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)