Munichs by David Peace review – bravura portrait of a football tragedy

Why the plural? There’s only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the slushy runway where British European Airways flight 609 crashes on February 6, 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spend their first bewildered night; the hospital where their fellow passengers recover – or don’t. This is surely the story of one accident, one time, one team: the air crash that killed 23 out of 44 passengers, including eight of Manchester United’s players, three of its staff, and eight journalists.

But Peace’s reasoning becomes clear over the several hundred pages of this relentless, electrifying, harrowing novel. The Munich Air Disaster, so integral a part of how the football club developed, and which had such a profound impact on the city, the north of England, the sporting community and the country as a whole, might easily not have happened had takeoff been aborted. And what would the world look like then?

Like much of Peace’s work, Munichs is an obsessional study in hauntology; not merely the idea that the past lives with us, but that multiple futures do, too. In extremis, time may seem to stop, but in reality, it judders on regardless, bringing with it, in this case, a grotesque juxtaposition of funerals and fixtures. What price now the victory over Red Star Belgrade that sent the team overseas?

The novel’s modus operandi is also one of juxtaposition, of a kind in which voices and scenes appear to melt into one another, marked by tonal shifts that the disoriented reader apprehends just after they have taken place, consistently wrongfooted. Here is Cissie Charlton, mother of Bobby and Jackie, filled with a sense of doom before the event that Bobby, the second of her four sons, is in danger. She rings Old Trafford from a phone box, and later arrives there to help field calls, answer letters, make endless cups of her “special tea”.

There is Jimmy Murphy, taking the managerial reins as Matt Busby lies critically ill in hospital, rousing the remnants of the team, phoning round clubs looking for replacement players, weeping over his rosary in his Whalley Range bedroom. Over there are the devastated landladies gathering together the belongings of the dead young players who had lodged with them, the taxi drivers offering survivors free rides, the kids scrabbling for tickets for the continuing season.

In the novel’s continuous present, time is relative: at Old Trafford, events accelerate, as the sporting calendar demands decisions nobody is ready to make, caught as they are in the far more exacting and unending schedule of grief. Before it seems even possible, signs of a slackening of sympathy begin to assert themselves, with the club slyly accused of mobilising sentimentality, of milking it. Meanwhile, the hospitalised watch the minutes of each day drift past, tormented by the guilt of having made it and, in Busby’s case when he finally comes to know the scale of disaster, by anguished thoughts that there were players he might just as well have left back home.

Implicit in Peace’s account is the knowledge of where we are now; spectators in a global industry of obscene wealth

What elevates Munichs above a recitation of an event so repeatedly discussed and memorialised that it has acquired a near-mythological status is Peace’s dogged devotion to particularity. The range of registers that he co-opts is incredible: he might switch from a bird’s-eye view of Cabra, the Dublin suburb to which the body of Liam “Billy” Whelan is repatriated, to a meeting of pitiless aviation inspectors, before plunging into a match report delivered in sports journalese. He can train an eye on a rain-sodden cortege – the weather is almost another character throughout – and then put himself in the mind of a player wondering whether he will ever kick a ball again, or want to.

And he is reticent, too, in narrating moments that seem to defy closer inspection, most notably as he describes the death of left-half Duncan Edwards two weeks after the crash, portraying it at a remove through the agonised vigil of his family and the sombre attentions of the medical staff.

Implicit in Peace’s account is the knowledge of where we are now; spectators in a global industry of extraordinary, obscene wealth, run by television companies and governing bodies with what frequently seems like contempt for the spirit and history of the game. The notes he repeatedly hits in mesmeric, metronymic prose could seem false, sentimental, nostalgic – the declarations of camaraderie, of triumph over tragedy, of glory sought to honour the men he consistently capitalises 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 anatomise the complex cultural, geographical and historical importance of sport are inextricable from what interests him about masculinity, citizenship and nationhood. All three books are conscious of the intersection of personal, social and environmental psychology, all determined that the uncommon – the egregious characters of Brian Clough and Bill Shankly, the randomness of a terrible accident – can reveal something of our shared beliefs and dispositions.

Peace has explained that Munichs was written after the death of his father, who had suggested he pay attention to the events of February 1958 and to Jimmy Murphy, a reluctant occupant of the limelight who emerges as one of the novel’s central and most absorbing consciousnesses. Here, again, is the need to understand what has preoccupied those closest to us, especially when we cannot access it directly. Born in 1967, Peace experienced these events and their wider context only as memory and retelling, to which he has now, valuably and valiantly, added his own.

• Munichs by David Peace is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.