Munichs by David Peace
Book review
At first, I was a bit disappointed with David Peace’s latest novel, Munichs. I am an admirer of Peace’s work generally but, when reading the early chapters, I found the style in this book to be too over-sentimental, which might sound a bit odd considering the subject matter. But Peace’s reimagining of the Munich air disaster and the aftermath was, at times, I felt, lacking substance. The dialogue and character behaviours felt cliched in some way, which had an adverse effect on how I empathised with the cast. But as a United fan, I’m well versed in both Munich folklore and how the tragedy redefined the club going forward, and how that redefining was perceived by non-United fans. One thing Peace does so well is to capture this juxtaposition of sympathy and grief that made United, for a time, most people’s second favourite, or indeed favourite team, with the indifference and outright derision from people who believed that the reaction to Munich was one of sensationalism and over-exaggeration.
Being a football fan first and a United fan second, I don’t think it is dishonest or over-romantic to say that Munich robbed not just United or the England national team of a great future, but also robbed football of what promised to be one of the great sides of the era, up there with the great Real Madrid side of Puskas and Di Stefano. Contrary claims from United haters can be explained as just that - a hatred of Manchester United that has its roots in a callous or flippant disregard towards the memory and romanticisation of the Busby Babes, ranging from a belief that the team itself and their potential was overhyped, to the idea that the tragedy has since been used as a marketing tool, exploited for commercial gain.
The latter view is particularly callous, as many other clubs who have suffered terrible disasters remember them in similar ways. Marking and remembering an event of such magnitude, for the people/club concerned, is surely understandable. It is in this context that I stuck with Peace’s novel. Despite the rather superficial way Peace seemingly portrayed the grieving parties (by which I mean the assumedly inadvertent flatness to the characters), his unflinching attention towards the derisors and unbothered speaks not only to football rivalry but humanity in general. In one criticism, for example, a board member from another club points to the Winter Hill air disaster that occurred just a few weeks after Munich, and the lack of comparative media coverage or public outpouring of grief. What is ironic about this opinion is that it comes from someone indifferent to one tragic event citing the indifference to another tragic event as reason enough to not get overly fussed about the tragic event. Leave the mourning to friends and loved ones, kind of thing. By inserting opinions like these into the narrative, Peace does something that the best writers do so well, and that is to say something about the human condition, and human behaviour.
The indifference to tragedies like Munich and Winter Hill, and the contrasting scale of coverage, touches on something awfully peculiar about human societies, one that, ultimately (and whether Peace intended this in his book or not), is of our alienation from each other. The lack of emotion toward tragic events and people we don’t know or care about is symptomatic of an alienated society. Of course, we can argue it is just the way humans are, how we have evolved. As a species, it is well understood that we are highly prone to attacking each other, whether it be on an individual basis, stemming from dislike or anger, or to group assaults carried out to gain land, resources, and domination. This long history of mistreatment between humans has exacerbated tribal behaviours and the idea of otherness that, by now, is seemingly inherent. Whether humans have always been like that we will probably never know. People like David Graeber and David Wengrow, through books like The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, entertain the idea, based on research and findings, that humans were not always in conflict or competition with each other.
Without intending to go too deep into hypotheticals about the unknown aspects of our history, human beings are now at a place whereby our emotion and considerations towards others, such as empathy, respect, understanding, goodwill, and love, are to be reserved only for our immediate family. We can have elements of these for other people too, but they are either earned or developed with people who become to be considered as lovers, partners, friends, or people within our large collective/tribe, such as fellow citizens of country, county, city, or town, people within an ethno-group or of the same religious affiliation, and people who live under the same precepted traditions and values i.e. people living in the Western world. For people not belonging to our identified groups, our attitudes range from indifference to outright hatred.
This is proven time and again in who we align ourselves with in conflicts in distant lands, such as those in Ukraine and Palestine. The case of Palestine is particularly shocking, with a level of dehumanisation in the western world so depraved that children of toddler age being blown to literal pieces is classed as collateral damage, and the fault of their own kind. Don’t get me wrong, Hamas, and their supporters and enablers, are also guilty of the same dehumanisations, but by siding with the actual aggressor in that region’s long history of conflict, supporters of Israel demonstrate a hierarchical structural value to life, where one group of people are worth more than another group of people, or where crimes committed by one group are seen to be righteous acts when committed by the group of which they have affiliated themselves with.
Essentially, human beings have become so numb to trauma and suffering that we are able to disconnect from it if we are not directly affected. We could argue that certain events or periods contribute to this mass numbness. Thinking of the late 1950s and Munich, we see a society traumatised and emotionally battered by two world wars. Compared to such devastation, a plane crash killing 23 people is, though tragic, nothing more than a minor incident in the grand scheme of things.
Going back to Peace’s novel, Munichs provides a visceral sense of this disconnect when its eye is cast over the opposing fans who let off taunts and abuse from the terraces. This callousness is, of course, reflected in the book title, with Munichs being a derogatory term aimed at United and its supporters. Now that I have finished the book, I am also rethinking that seeming flatness within the main cast, and how the style of the prose, in the repetition or words and the over-emphasis on certain moments, captures a detachment within the narrator’s own voice, and within the characters themselves. Bobby Charlton, for example, is in a state of shock, as are Harry Gregg and Bill Foulkes. For the latter two, who were able to walk away from the crash relatively unscathed, there is an immediate sense of guilt that accompanies the trauma of their experience. This guilt will soon be felt by Charlton, too, and the manager, Matt Busby.
The narrator, however, is hyper-focused on infusing the narrative with pitying tones - poor old Bobby kind of vibes. It has left me with a mixed, rather confused opinion. Obviously, this is the direct aftermath of the tragedy, not the subsequent rebuild and overcoming that was finally reached ten years later, when under Busby, and with Foulkes and Charlton (as captain) in the side, United won the European Cup. I wasn’t expecting an overtly romantic book, then, depicting its cast as supermen who bounced back immediately. But, in hindsight, I’m wondering if that narrative style is meant to challenge us, the readers, maybe some of whom will be of the opinion that the whole thing regarding the team’s greatness was overstated, into confronting our attitudes toward other people’s trauma and grief. Is our reaction to tragic events, and the sectioning of them into orders of significance, demonstrative of a lost connection within humankind? Or am I simply overthinking the whole thing?
As my initial disappointment started to lessen, I saw the novel as an exploration of grief, resilience, and the cruelty that survivors and mourners of tragic events have to endure. One scene that stands out is of Harry Gregg responding to insults and mockeries from the crowd, shouting back to them that he hopes they never go through what he has. This scene, more than any other, perhaps, captures Peace’s motivations in writing the novel - of defying anyone to “read this book and then tragedy chant” again.