Good evening!
I hope everyone is well and looking forward to the bank holiday weekend -- I’m actually going back to work tomorrow so I don’t get one, but I have had two weeks off so there’s that. I had a really lovely holiday this week and read a great book while I was away, so I’m pretty content. I’m also thrilled that strawberries are in season in the UK and am going to have some after I finish this :)
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My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
While I was away I read an advanced copy of David Peace’s Munichs, which is out in August from Faber. I absolutely loved this and will definitely be reading more of Peace -- it’s weird that I haven’t, I think. I love football, and Peace’s most well-read books have been about football; The Damned Utd. (2016) is about Manchester United and Red or Dead (2013) is about my team, Liverpool, so I will most certainly be getting that soon. Munichs is also about football, centring on the plane crash of 1958 that killed 23 passengers, more than half of the people on board. Of those 23, 8 were Manchester United players and 3 were Manchester United staff, the rest of the victims being newspaper reporters, aircraft crew and other people involved with the team. The passengers were on their way back from a match in Belgrade, which they had won. They stopped to refuel at Munich, but after two failed take offs, the plane crashed into a house situated at the end of the runway.
This is where the novel starts, which I thought was interesting. Whereas others may have built up the people involved with the crash as characters first, Peace goes headfirst into the narrative’s defining event. This is really a novel that is concerned with aftermath, layering in former contexts to this analysis of what came next as it progresses. Munichs has its eyes everywhere; the past, present and future is given to us as one as Peace makes his way through the stories of those who survived and those who didn’t. It’s quite a whirlwind to read at times, especially as the narrator adopts the dialect of each person in order for us to see how they existed and what their culture was like. I think this says a lot about how place goes a long way in defining how people are in the world, especially in the subtleties of different upbringings -- Bobby Charlton’s background in Newcastle, for example, is spoken of in different terms to Liam Whelan’s in Dublin, even though they had comparative class and identity-based upbringings. What I liked particularly about this method of storytelling was how it never felt forced -- Peace doesn’t rely on hyperbolic dialect and behaviours from certain areas in order for us to see that a person is from there.
The narrative is largely held together by Jimmy Murphy, the assistant manager of Manchester United who steps into the main role as manager Matt Busby recovered from his serious injuries in hospital. Jimmy is his own person, but he also encapsulates the feelings that surround the disaster -- the guilt at not being one of the people who were on it, the headache of trying to form a team when half of the first team have died or are too injured to play, the absolute horror and grief of losing such young men as well as respected sports journalists, some of whom were former footballers themselves. Jimmy is a man who feels things strongly and is quick to anger, which makes him the perfect way into this story because he reacts in the ways that I think a lot of other people would. Jimmy’s grief is everyone’s grief, and his euphoria in moments after the disaster is everyone’s euphoria.
This is a book that is very much about football (although I really don’t think you need to be a football fan to read and appreciate it), but it is also about Britain as it was in the ‘50s. Most of the men in the novel have fought in one of the world wars, and are quite clearly dealing with very complex PTSD that is heightened by the crash. It is unthinkable, now, that these people should go through the horrors of war and then another traumatising event and not receive any help, or really any extended acknowledgement that they might not be in the right frame of mind to go on living normally. What Munichs shows its contemporary reader very well is how British people, especially British men, were largely dealing with untreated cases of severe mental strain and illness, and how a lot of unhealthy cultural norms can be traced back to this.
I think that this is an interesting thing to highlight in a book that markets itself as a narrative about hope. Hope is one of the driving factors for those impacted by the crash; the hope that Manchester United will rebuild itself, the hope that the men who were in the crash will recover; the hope that something like this never happens again. There is little hope to be found, however, in how the men cope after the event. Bobby Charlton quite famously never spoke about it again after some months had passed, and although he was instrumental in rebuilding the club and a footballer who went on to have a very successful career, there is still something extremely unhopeful and depressing about how this was just not dealt with. It’s a notable dichotomy that I think is entirely intentional in Peace’s project.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I loved this book. It’s incredibly moving and very well-rendered, doing justice to the disaster and its victims.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I’ve just now picked up Helen O’Hara’s Women Vs. Hollywood (2021) after reading the first chapter ages ago and then inexplicably putting it down. It’s very good, and I’ve underlined a lot already.