Absent World Cup withdrawal this mid-July, the chances of my picking up David Peace’s Red or Dead, an epic novel about the rise to glory of the red-clad Liverpool Football Club in pre-Thatcher England, would have been precisely zero. I played soccer as a kid, but prior to this year’s Cup, like millions of other oblivious Americans, I had not watched or much thought about the sport as an adult. I knew Liverpool was the Beatles’ hometown, but otherwise it meant nothing to me, and I knew Peace only as the author of the four novels on which the BBC Red Riding trilogy was based. I watched Red Riding soon after The Sopranos and The Wire finished their runs but before it was clear that the golden age of TV was never going to end. The Peace/BBC cycle has since gotten lost, for me, in a sea of high-quality antihero and “dead girl” crime dramas.
Also, I distrust sports stories. Sporting events themselves can be beautiful, but it’s a beauty so intimately bound up with the unrepeatability of specific moments that art can only ham-handedly gesture at it. Sports stories, meanwhile, tend toward the criminally banal: David and Goliath, triumph over adversity, hard work pays off. And world-class athletes out of uniform are invariably less interesting than ordinary people, at least until age thirty-five or so, when their real lives begin.
Red or Dead, as I learned only after I had started reading it, is Peace’s second soccer novel. His first, The Damned Utd (a reference to the Leeds United Football Club), was made into a movie and clearly has fans in Great Britain. It is a well-crafted, visceral book with a terrifically alive protagonist, the foul-mouthed alcoholic manager Brian Clough. Clough built two championship teams out of thin air in the 1960s and 1970s, at Derby County and Nottingham Forest, but Peace dramatizes his disastrous 44-day stint with Leeds United in 1974, a powerhouse team whose every player and stakeholder, give or take, he managed to alienate. Though it is a book about sports, The Damned Utd is really about a single, vividly exasperating human in a situation that does not fit him. Put a character like Clough in the corner office of an accounting firm, and you’d have a similarly absorbing novel.
Red or Dead’s central character, Bill Shankly, is likewise based on an actual British football manager who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. The two books’ protagonists are contemporaries and competitors who grudgingly respect one another. Each is a significant presence in the mind of the other, and in both novels they exchange semi-aggressive congratulatory words on the post-game touchline. There is even a scene, a high-profile ceremonial game at Wembley Stadium, that appears in both, but with a markedly different meaning from book to book. In terms of ambition, however, there is no comparison. Red or Dead is the more ambitious novel by miles. It is big—715 pages as published in hardcover by Melville House—and it takes big stylistic risks in the pursuit of big ideas.
Though I would urge patience with Red or Dead’s narrative voice, I have no doubt that some readers will be immediately and irretrievably put off by it. On first encounter it calls to mind Rain Man, or a slightly buttoned-up Gertrude Stein:
In the winter-time, in the night-time, they remembered him. And then they came to him. In the winter-time, in the night-time. Not cap in hand, not on bended knee. Not this sort. But still they came. Here to Leeds Road, Huddersfield. Here on October 17, 1959. They came—
In the winter-time, in the night-time.
Winter-time, night-time—got it. Aside from this portentous litany, there is only the coming of a certain “they,” qualified with clichés (“cap in hand,” “bended knee”), proper nouns, and a date. As an opening, this would be laughable if the book continued on in a more conventional style. Instead, it quickly becomes clear, repetition is the novel’s basic structuring device, dominating nearly every paragraph, paragraphs themselves repurposed again and again with only slight variations. Though I’d begun the book hoping to prolong my immersion in the world of elite football, within ten pages the nuttiness of Peace’s style—nutty, at least, in terms of the book’s marketability in the United States—became my primary reason for reading. What on earth was he after? Was there any chance he could pull it off?
“They” are the directors of the Liverpool Football Club, and “him” is Shankly, who was hired away from a smaller town’s team in 1959 and remained Liverpool’s manager through 1974, by which point the team regularly competed at the highest levels of British and European football. Here he is arriving at Anfield, the Liverpool stadium, to begin his first season:
In Liverpool, at Anfield. Bill walked around the ground with Arthur Riley. Bill looked at the turnstiles and Bill looked at the stands. Bill looked at the seats and Bill looked at the toilets. Bill looked at the dressing rooms and Bill looked at the tunnel. And then Bill walked out onto the pitch. The Anfield pitch. Bill stood on the pitch, Bill stamped on the pitch. Once, twice. Bill shook his head. Once, twice. And Bill said, How do you water this pitch, Arthur? Where do you keep your watering equipment?
The repetitions (“Bill walked,” “Bill looked,” “Anfield,” “Once, twice”) create a sort of spiraling effect, the narrative moving through time but incessantly circling back, as though afraid of having missed something. This is plainly, on one level, a means of rendering Shankly’s mental patterns on the page (he speaks in much the same way), showing us the problem of soccer as he sees it and solves it, via obsessive attention and methodical progress from subject to subject, looping back before moving on, as though to double-check that he has overlooked no specific sub-problem.
But psychological realism is not Peace’s brief. He is interested in the textures and results of Shankly’s mental processes, without being interested in Shankly’s consciousness per se. We know the general laws of Shankly’s mind’s movement because we walk and look with him, and because we hear what he says once he has made a decision. We do not, however, experience his decision-making process from the inside, and his emotional life is almost entirely implied. His wife’s coughing upstairs in her sleep while he plots strategy downstairs at night lets us know, over the course of years, that Shankly is growing increasingly concerned about her health, and that this is affecting his calculation about when to retire from his job. When Liverpool’s directors sell a reserve player without his consent, we accompany Shankly as he types a letter to them, but neither the word “resignation” nor any idea connected with it is mentioned until later, when he discusses the possibility with a confidante. Likewise, I read Peace’s complete avoidance, beyond that first paragraph, of third-person pronouns—the most potentially insufferable of the affectations an unsympathetic reader might accuse him of—as signaling his desire to interfere with the default assumptions of psychological realism. The incessant repetition of “Bill” and “Bill Shankly” may reflect the textures of the man’s mind, but it also incessantly estranges us from him, lets us know that we are not, in fact, in his mind.
This may sound archly paradoxical: a novel whose style and structure correspond to the idiosyncrasies of a particular character’s mind, even as we sense that we are not, in fact, immersed in that character’s mind. And it would no doubt be archly paradoxical, if Red or Dead weren’t a novel about team sports. Because the book is built on Shanklyesque repetition, we require several cycles of repetition, several football seasons, before the other dimensions of the novel’s style begin to resolve.
In his second season at Liverpool, Shankly devises a proprietary training method, the “sweat box,” to ensure that his team never loses for lack of conditioning. The sweat box is a ten-by-ten, eight-foot-high wooden square placed on the practice pitch, inside of which players take turns kicking and trapping and kicking the ball again:
Two players in the box. And a ball over the top into the box. The first player shoots against one board. First time. Ball after ball. Every second, another ball. Into the box. Every second for one minute. Ball after ball. Into the box. Then for two minutes. Ball after ball. Into the box. Then for three minutes. Ball after ball. Into the box. Again and again. Ball after ball. Into the box. Every second. Shot after shot. Every second. Inside the box. Every player. Player after player. Into the box, inside the box. The players working in the box, the box working on the players.
The sweat box paragraph recurs repeatedly across the novel as the team reassembles each July to train for the upcoming season, and we come to expect and look forward to its reappearance. The team will get the proper conditioning, we know, so long as they stick with the sweat box. We likewise know that, once they have finished with the sweat box, they will not work on set pieces or intricate strategy of any sort. They will simply play, squaring off against each other in scaled-down scrimmages, Shankly himself taking part in these scrimmages, “Bill Shankly laughing, Bill Shankly joking,” three-a-sides and then five-a-sides, “Bill Shankly laughing, Bill Shankly joking,” seven-a-sides and then eleven-a-sides, “Bill Shankly laughing, Bill Shankly joking.” Football is repetition, and Bill Shankly’s mind—the most important part of it, anyway—is football.
In addition to training, of course, there are games. Descriptions of Liverpool games occupy perhaps half of the novel’s pages, but notably, given that the book is devoted to the rise of a championship team, the action in each game is summarily catalogued rather than dramatized:
On Saturday 7 March, 1964, Ipswich Town Football Club came to Anfield, Liverpool. That afternoon, thirty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-five folk came, too. In the forty-first minute, Ian St John scored. In the forty-eighth minute, Roger Hunt scored. In the fifty-fifth minute, Alf Arrowsmith scored. In the seventieth minute, Peter Thompson scored. Two minutes later, Hunt scored again. And in the eighty-third minute, Arrowsmith scored again. And Liverpool Football Club beat Ipswich Town six-nil. At home, at Anfield.
This paragraph, with variations pertaining to dates and numbers and players’ names, appears hundreds of times in the novel. There are minor flourishes that signal the importance of one game relative to another, but these flourishes are embedded within the strict, recurring pattern of sentence construction, as though reminding us that, no matter how decisive or memorable a game might be, it is still only another game:
On Good Friday, 1964, Liverpool Football Club travelled to White Hart Lane, London. That Good Friday, the gates at White Hart Lane were closed an hour before kick-off. That Friday, fifty-six thousand, nine hundred and fifty-two folk came to White Hart Lane, London. And on Good Friday, 1964, just before the half-hour, Liverpool Football Club broke out of defence. Quickly. The long pass to Arrowsmith. Quickly. The square flick to Hunt and an error by Henry. And quickly, Hunt scored. That Good Friday, just after the hour, Byrne passed to Arrowsmith. Quickly. Arrowsmith passed to Thompson. Quickly. The flick to St John, the chip over the defence. And again, there was Hunt. And again quickly, Hunt scored. That Friday, three minutes later, the deep centre into the box from Callaghan. Quickly. And again, there was Hunt. And again quickly, Hunt scored. His third, his hat-trick. And on Good Friday, 1964, Liverpool Football Club beat Tottenham Hotspur three-one. Away from home, away from Anfield.
There will always be another game. Each game is as important as the next.
In the rigidity of its music as well as its focus on the “combat” of team sports, Red or Dead calls to mind no book so much as The Iliad. Peace courts this comparison and, astonishingly, is not diminished by it. The Iliad is, among many other things, an exhaustive catalogue of who killed who in the Trojan War, and how. Homer’s cataloguing is subject to rigid compositional patterns, countless people speared “beside the nipple” (in the Fagles translation) and countless others taking spears to the skull. Death arrives, again and again, as a dark swirl or mist across the eyes. Though scholars convincingly show that the demands of dactylic hexameter largely explain the patterning of the repeated phrases and epithets in The Iliad, repetition also answers an elemental problem of representation. In trying to render the experience of war, it is necessary to convey the sheer volume of killing, the fact that one irreplaceable life after another is lost. But there is a drastic mismatch between the number of deaths and the possible ways of describing them. Repetition, in this context, is simply sane.
Peace reckons with a similar problem, goals scored and games won or lost being the equivalents of men killed and skirmishes won or lost. To dramatize each of fifteen years’ worth of games, let alone each individual goal, would be an absurd task. Still, a season is nothing if not the total of goals scored and games won or lost, and Shankly’s career is largely the sum of those yearly totals and the titles they brought the team. The relentless cataloguing, the embedding of statistics (drawn, as Peace acknowledges in an appendix, from the incredibly exhaustive Liverpool FC stats site) in a kind of latter-day prose equivalent of dactylic hexameter, allows him to forego drama without sacrificing immediacy. The highly patterned prose works on the brain like music you can’t get out of your head, so that you begin to experience the rhythm of a season itself. The result is tension as gripping as that of any detailed scene, though it is a tension that spans large expanses of narrative summary. The music bends us to the team’s movement through a season, the attempts to climb the league standings and stay at the top, to advance in the FA and European Cup tournaments, to overcome injuries and the aging of key players, and to play in all manner of awful English weather.
What Peace finally seems after, then, with his peculiarly repetitive, rigidly structured style, is the experience not of being Bill Shankly but of being part of Bill Shankly’s team, its step-by-step construction over the course of whole seasons and careers, the relentless energy required to maintain its place near the top of the British First Division (today’s Premier League). Red or Dead’s narrative voice reflects not simply Shankly’s individual consciousness but a group consciousness that he has painstakingly assembled, methodically but with no small amount of guile. To construct a team capable of regularly competing for championships, Peace suggests, is indistinguishable from constructing such a consciousness. To be inside such a consciousness, he persuades us, is the highest experience in sports.
The Liverpool FC consciousness extends, furthermore, beyond the collective experience of the players and coaching staff. When Shankly benches one of the team’s longtime stars, center-forward Roger Hunt, toward the end of the 1968-69 season, Hunt lashes out at him: “And I thought you had more respect for me. After all the games I have played for you, after all the goals I have scored for you. I thought you had more respect for me than to take me off, than to substitute me.” Shankly answers,
I believe you are one of the greatest centre-forwards I have ever seen, son. I believe you have played in some of the greatest games I have ever seen. I believe you have scored some of the greatest goals I have ever seen. But it is not about me. And it is not about you. You did not play in those games for me. You played in those games for Liverpool Football Club. For the team. And for the supporters of Liverpool Football Club. For the people. Not for me, son. And not for you. Every single decision we make, every single thing we do, is for Liverpool Football Club. For the team. And for the supporters of Liverpool Football Club. For the people. Not for you, not for me. For the team, for the people.
Shankly’s sentiments about the people of Liverpool may sound banal when stated baldly out of context, and it is hard to take them seriously given how regularly today’s most narcissistic athletes and coaches hold forth in a similar vein. But with Shankly, it is different. What might sound banal in isolation has the force of true insight when stitched into the looping weave of a style that embodies those very sentiments. We live the Shankly consciousness, the Liverpool FC consciousness, and we know in our spine that it is not bullshit.
And there is another, historically specific context in which Shankly’s commitment to “the people” goes beyond familiar sports bromides: he is the son of a Scottish miner and a proud socialist—a red—who considers his position as a football manager the primary forum for enacting his politics. Throughout his managerial years he speaks of his socialism as indistinguishable from his emphasis on the team over the individual and his unshakable commitment to the working-class fans of Liverpool. He answers every letter he receives from fans (even the petulant requests for tickets to sold-out matches), he plays pick-up games with kids when they ask, and he gives innumerable unpaid interviews in retirement. Late in the novel, after his career has ended, while interviewing the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson for a radio show, Shankly maintains that “our football was always a form of socialism” and that “You are born what you are. And I think that a man is a socialist at heart.”
The equation of professional sports with socialism may sound, to American ears, far more preposterous than any of Peace’s radical stylistic choices. But then again, if I learned anything playing youth sports, it was the importance of subsuming my individual desires into a larger team consciousness. And it is precisely the corruption of the concept of teamwork in the age of $100 million contracts and totalizing corporate sponsorships that has kept me from caring about professional sports as an adult. British football has been contaminated by these forces as surely as American sports (Liverpool FC is currently owned by the American financier and Boston Red Sox owner John W. Henry), and Red or Dead might be seen as an elegy for that period when the game was played by and for the working classes and perhaps even seemed an authentic expression of their collectivist sensibility.
It’s important, too, that Shankly’s socialism owes less to Marx than to an illustrious fellow Scot, Robert Burns, who wrote nothing at all about revolution but whose work testifies to great sympathy with the ordinary people among whom he lived. The socialism of a Burns or a Shankly, consisting primarily of concern for the everyday struggles of working people, is ultimately hard to distinguish from what used to be called common human decency. In writing an elegy for Bill Shankly’s world, then, Peace suggests that what has been lost goes far beyond sports. Or to put it another way, he shows us ourselves in soccer. A month ago, I would not have believed that this was possible.
In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer asks us to do just this kind of reflection. Many reviews of Eating Animals focus on the more practical concerns and issues that Foer raises about factory farming-how our farm animals are overcrowded, over medicated and sick and the implications of this for us, the people eating the animals. For Foer, these issues are important in that they reinforce the urgency with which we must recognize the horrors of factory farming, while showing us that there is nothing natural about the process of eating meat today at all.
Do not agree that this book is not remotely brave, it is totally cowardly and full of snobbery and faulty logic. Something doesn’t become “brave” merely because its premise is one you agree with.
http://thesecondpass.com/?p=3589
That this book is even remotely brave.
I think you are wrong on that, D. It is a premise most people are vehemently in disagreement with, and the investigative work Foer did, getting into those factories was very dangerous, and nobody, except, perhaps, PETA, bothers to do investigative journalism like that anymore. I believe those things are what makes the writing of this book brave. Although, some of that bravery is muted by the fact that Foer does not take a hard line stand in favour of vegetarianism, but I think that is because he knows that there are too many people in complete blind denial about the suffering of the animals we eat.
I guess I’m having a hard time believing being a vegetarian in park slope in 2009 is in any way comparable to blacks risking their life and limbs to protest segregation in the 50s deep south. In fact, that seems pretty insulting to me.
Being vegetarian is fine, but it is not brave. You are not risking anything except some snide comments from your friends now and then, but lord knows you’ll be making as many back at them.
Thanks for your comments, D.
To clarify, I don’t think that Foer’s book is brave because I agree with it or because I think there is something intrinsically brave about being a vegetarian. To me, Foer’s book is brave because it is highlighting an issue that many people don’t care about or else tend to minimize. Foer is not afraid to face that kind of criticism and I find that kind of commitment to his ideals brave,
Foer’s quote regarding protesting segregation highlights the way in which every generation tends to be a bit myopic. His argument is that what was seen as a radical act then is now perceived as an ultimate act of justice. He contends that refusing to support factory farming is now perceived as radical, but is actually the right and moral thing to do.
It seems to me that Foer’s book is brave precisely because it has to contend with attitudes like D’s.
Arielle,
Thanks for your response. I have a lot I’d argue with you, but I might as well save it for my own review (one where I will certainly get negative comments on the internet for and perhaps that will make me brave, eh cooper?). But I would like to address this:
“It might sound naïve to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”
The above, to me, is totally representative of the smug and intellectually shallow thinking Foer displays in the book. What happened was not people sitting in different seats in a restaurant. What happened was masses of oppressed people risked life and limb to break laws they thought were unjust. It would not have sounded fantastic at all to tell someone in the 1950s, “Oh, can you believe that massive civil unrest might change our laws about race?”
There is no risk of life or limb to buy a Boca burger. There are no laws being broken. There is simply no comparison. One might as well say “It would have sounded crazy in 1930 to say that a few Americans visiting a beach in Europe would end WWII.”
Foer is not trying to make an intellectual point there (I hope at least), he is only making an emotional one. A dishonest emotional point I would argue, which again seems representative of the book as I read it.
D.,
I think we are actually agreeing on Foer’s intent. We just disagree on whether it is a good move or not. As I state in my review, I believe that Foer is ultimately making an emotional argument, one which will alienate some readers, and one which I am personally open to, since I feel like I have an emotional stake at investigating these issues.
This doesn’t mean I agree with everything Foer advocates; it means I considered this book to be an important and thought provoking read. I don’t consider the personal experience to be antithetical to intellectual honesty- in fact, the whole point of Foer’s inclusion of the personal is to demonstrate the way in which our own experience filters our moral choices.
I chose that specific quote from Eating Animals because I felt it was polarizing and would probably alienate some readers. I think that’s a deliberate choice on Foer’s part- he is trying to ignite some kind of reaction. I still think that Foer’s main point, in making this analogy, is not to equate animal rights with civil rights, but to compare the tendency of people to think that individual choices don’t matter. During the 1950s there were many people who believed that Civil Rights would never happen…in fact, there are people today who say we still have a heck of a lot to accomplish. I don’t think these are equal issues, but I do think it is an apt analogy. Some people today think that food choices won’t ever be enough to overturn factory farming just as some people in the 1950s did not think that civil disobedience would be enough to end segregation. In hindsight, it is easy to say, “Of course- civil rights naturally happened!” At that time, I don’t think the impact was necessarily clear.
As far as snobbery goes- I simply did not feel that Foer’s argument has class connotations. Yes, certain types of vegetarian food are more expensive, but lots of vegetarian meals are incredibly cheap and just as healthy. The reason people aren’t running out to eat rice and beans in the US and many other places is cultural. Much of the world enjoys a vegetarian diet. Foer’s claims are not unique to young bourgeoisie hipsters living in New York. Philosophers have been debating the ethical implications of eating meat- how we raise animals, how we kill them, etc….for centuries, all over the world. I think bringing up these issues is valid and important.
Much of the world “enjoys” a vegetarian diet because they cannot afford meat. Meat consumption has been rising dramatically across the globe as meat has become cheaper and more available globally. To say it is merely cultural differences does not seem accurate to me. There is a factory farmer who brings up this point in the book. I think if you want a brave confrontation with the issues of factory farming, which are many and serious, you absolutely must confront the class issues. You can say that it is possible to eat rice and beans and be healthy, but food is not merely energy and that is not what people want to eat and that is why the rich hipster vegetarians spend lots of money on expensive vegan products and meat substitutes.
Foer’s arguments really do result in a world where the rich can enjoy the pleasures of meat and animal product consumption through family-farm products while the poor are denied yet another pleasure.
I think this is fine if you want to make that argument, I like bold arguments. But I believe you must actually make it, not simply avoid the entire issue of class.
Hi again, D.
Forgive me, but I actually grew up eating rice and beans. My mother is from Cuba and I always saw rice and beans as comfort food. It is cultural.
Your argument is actually supporting mine. Vegetarian food is cheaper than meat. The fact that meat is considered superior to vegetarian cuisine is entirely cultural. There are people in the world who would never eat pork or beef or other types of meat because it goes against their religious beliefs- and you know what? These cultures have great cuisines too.
Culture can change. More people the world over could be fed if we all adopted a vegetarian diet. Additionally, Foer doesn’t agree that anyone should have the right to the “pleasures” of meat, when that pleasure comes at the expense of ethically raised animals.
If you don’t want to change your diet because you don’t deem this issue important enough to merit attention, that’s fine. but it’s not necessarily a class issue as you make it out to be. It’s a cultural issue and a matter of taste.
D.
Seems to me like you’re just being belligerent here. Arielle is simply recounting her experiences as a vegetarian, while examining Foer’s take on the issues pertinent to eating (and enjoying) meat. Actually, given your wholesale rejection of a particular lifestyle, you remind me of those holier-than-thou Park-Slope vegetarians you seem to despise. We can critique other people’s personal choices all we want, but at the end of the day, these kinds of personal choices rarely effect us. What we have here is a thoughtful consideration of a particular kind of lifestyle, no more, no less. Your real beef (pun intended) is with Foer, not the reviewer, so I’d suggest you find a way to contact him.
Bravery, like many things, depends on context. I can not understand how being a vegetarian in Park Slope (or advocating vegetarianism from there) can be called brave. I mean, what is he risking? Is he going to receive death threats by some shady cattle owner’s organization?
The really irritating thing about Safran Foer is his lack of humility, his profound self-righteousness. Two things that are quite common these days and have nothing to do with being brave.
Beatrix
My opening comment was probably too harsh, so I apologize for that. For whatever it is worth I do not reject the lifestyle of vegetarianism, whatever that would mean. I have plenty of respect for vegetarians. What I don’t have respect for is unfounded self-righteousness, poor logic and dishonest arguments. It annoys me whether it is Jonathan Safran Foer in this book or your average meat-eater who comes into this debate just to brag about how great fried chicken tastes. I’m rejecting the arguments, not the lifestyle.
This D person, I am thinking has some interest in the meat industry.
His arguments about false logic are themselves inaccurate and nonsensical.
The comparison to previous social revolutions is a valid on in that there are also millions of lives on the line here and people are breaking laws and dedicating their lives to perform investigations and work undercover for years. Its easy to speak against animals when they do not have a voice. It’s up to humanity to give them one.