Munichs

"The title of the book might confuse people: Why has he put an ‘s’ on the end of Munich? He does that because ‘Munichs’ is used as an insult, a way to taunt Manchester United fans. In 1958, a plane carrying their team back from a European competition crashed in Germany in the ice. A lot of the players on board died or were injured. It was a team that was packed full of young talent. Sir Matt Busby was the manager, and they were called the ‘Busby Babes.’ The crash wrecked the Manchester community. There is something very poignant about these very young players: one minute you’re watching them run around playing football and scoring goals, and you’re cheering them, and the next minute they’re dead. That’s hard to compute. I cried about six separate times while reading this book. It is very, very moving. It was also a strange plane crash, because some people were unscathed. They stood up and walked away wondering, ‘Oh? Something weird happened here. I don’t have my shoes on anymore.’ And a few seats further in front, their teammate was dead. There’s a lot of heroism in the book. In Manchester, Jimmy Murphy keeps the club going. That’s the element of the book that’s really intriguing if you like your football. To fulfill matches, Murphy has to find players and get a team out. He’s lost his best players. Other clubs phone him up and say, ‘If we can help you out, we will.’ But when he actually tries to get their help they say, ‘Oh well, you know, it’s not really fair, is it?’ David Peace is a fine writer. He has a very distinct style. Some people say it’s a novel, not a sports book—but it’s a curious combination of the two. His research for this book has been incredible, you cannot accuse him of going off on flights of fancy without pinning down what happened. The fiction comes in in that it’s all internal monologue. It’s about what the people involved, the survivors, were thinking, how they’re coping. That’s made up. He can’t know what their inner monologue was. But because he’s done so much research, you believe it: it has an element of truth to it. You think, ‘Why wouldn’t they be thinking that way?’ Like These Heavy Black Bones, it’s a long piece of poetry, in a way. I think it’s the most accessible of the David Peace books. Someone called it Joycean, which makes it sound like a book you would not pick up. But it’s only Joycean in that it’s lyrical and beautiful. It is very accessible. It’s a hard one. How can you recommend a book when it’s made you cry? I feel that’s an evil thing to do to someone. But if you’re thinking, ‘I might give that a miss, because it sounds like a James Joyce’ I would say, ‘No, give it a go, because it’s a very specific style and it will in some way enrich your life, even if you do cry like I did.’ This book should be compulsory reading for people who do not like Manchester United, because it would stop them taunting them at football matches about the crash. It happened a long time ago, and opposition fans do still chant it. Tragedy chanting is illegal, but people still do it. If you read this book, you would not think about it as a joke ever again."