Munichs by David Peace review – United in guilt and grief

You could see Peace’s new book as his third in a series of novels centred on football bosses – the Manageriad? – after The Damned Utd (about Brian Clough) and Red or Dead (Bill Shankly). It unfolds more than three months after the Munich air disaster of 1958 , when the plane carrying Matt Busby’s Manchester United home from a European
Cup tie in Belgrade crashed after a stop to refuel, killing 20 of the 44
people on board, with three more dying later in hospital.

Writing in the third person but from the point of view of dozens of those involved – players, journalists, families – Peace dramatises the crash, its aftermath and how United, then reigning champions, managed to complete the remaining third of the season under Busby’s assistant, Jimmy Murphy, miraculously reaching the FA Cup final. It’s a tale of duty, guilt and blame, with the day-to-day commitments on the pitch and boardroom fulfilled amid the burying of the dead and nagging questions about why the plane crashed. A voice inside the head of goalkeeper Harry Gregg, tormented after saving fellow passengers from the wreckage, asks why no one on board spoke up about not taking off in bad weather. “Because like all people,” he replies, “we’re afraid to lose face in front of our friends.”

It’s a stirring proposition but there are doubts about Peace’s handling from the start, with an on-the-nose epigraph from James Joyce’s The Dead introducing a prologue in which the United players, a month before the crash, enter the pitch at Arsenal in white away kit, emerging “out of the tunnel like a ghost train”, a line I winced to read – and that’s before the first line proper, in which Bobby Charlton’s mum is worrying
that “something was wrong, she just didn’t know what”. Her friend agrees: “Can you not sense there’s something in the air … ?”, just as Peace cuts to the wreckage.

One funeral procession after another is described via names of roads on the route

Yet the fault in Munichs isn’t artistic licence – rather, its lack. After The Damned Utd , former Leeds midfielder John Giles sued Peace for his portrayal as “a scheming leprechaun” (Giles’s words), and it’s hard not to feel that Peace has been wary of taking liberties ever since, portraying Shankly from the outside in Red or Dead and doing similar here. One funeral procession after another is described via names of roads on the route; unremarkable action is narrated to imply troubled psychological states, as when we see Murphy in his garden “out in the cold, damp morning, pacing up and down… holding his rosary, its beads and its crucifix in his hand, rubbing at the figure and face of Christ on the Cross as he paced, as he prayed, first asking for forgiveness, then asking for comfort, comfort for others, asking for strength, strength for others, then strength for himself, the strength to help others, the strength to go on, to somehow go on.”

Effective, for sure, but it also feels like a workaround; Peace is in his comfort zone whenever he can give us a good long list, as when Busby, out of hospital, at last gets to watch a match at Old Trafford only to find himself confusing living players with a team sheet of the dead. Individuation matters less than accretion – you feel Peace is seeking the basic drama of how dozens of families suffered the same agony at the same time. Throughout, there’s tension from the title, because Peace doesn’t explain in the novel itself that rival fans still taunt United supporters as “Munichs”; it’s as if he wanted to frame a story about the best of football with the worst of the sport.

His afterword defies anyone to read the novel and still use “Munich” as a slur, which seems to misunderstand his likely audience; he even says United fans (he supports Huddersfield) might reclaim the taunt as a badge of the club’s uniqueness. That suggestion hints at the mood of nostalgia in which this novel was written – capturing an era in which fans awaited results in Saturday evening’s paper or a footballer could be nicknamed after a character on The Archers – yet it’s surely also true that the Munich disaster is the tragic prehistory underpinning the vast and much less obviously heroic commercial enterprise we know today. But my hunch is that this great author would need to be in a less wistful mood – the mood of his novel GB84 , perhaps – to want to narrow his eyes at that.

• 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