David Peace - author
Created | Updated Oct 14, 2004
David Peace is in Waterstone’s Book Shop on Albion Street in Leeds reading from his latest novel ‘GB84’ , which is a day-to-day account of the 1984/85 Miners’ Strike. It’s Thursday 26th February 2004 and Peace has flown in to the UK from Japan where he now lives to promote the books release. There are a fair few people in the store, surrounding the author who is stood before some promo blow-ups of the book cover with a stack of copies piled up before him.
Peace, dressed in black, seems to be taking it in his stride, answering questions and looking like a literary version of pint-sized eclectic dance music guru Moby. Shaved head, introspective, and slightly geeky.
Peace was born in Ossett, West Yorkshire in 1967. At an early age in the 1970s he became obsessed with the Yorkshire Ripper to the point that he had dark suspicions about his own father being the serial killer, and would constantly listen to the ‘hoax’ tapes of the Geordie-accented man who claimed to be the Ripper, taunting West Yorkshire Police about their inability to catch him. Following a prolonged period of unemployment, Peace came through the other side, got published, and now lives in Tokyo with his wife and kids.
As a novelist, Peace’s Red-Riding quartet (the novels ‘Nineteen Seventy-four’, Ninety Seventy-seven’, ‘Nineteen Eighty’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-three’ – published by Serpent’s Tail each year between 1999 and 2002) is an achievement of logistics in itself. Four novels that take real crime – including Peace’s early fascination with the Yorkshire Ripper – as their pivot, though detection is not necessarily their main focus, with a timescale stretching over a decade and a half with four key years, a wide range of conflicting storytellers and their [distorted] viewpoints.
The novels are all written in the first person with the narrative handled by two main voices per book, and the baton of protagonist handed over successively between four very different sets of men through the series – Eddie Dunford the ambitious journalist, Jack Whitehead the established journalist starting to lose it (‘Crime Reporter of the Year 1969 and 1971’ becoming a mantra of decline), Peter Hunter the bobby who investigates bobbies, and finally the beer, kebab and casual sex-loving solicitor, big John Pigott. These voices are then surrounded by others – the shadowy Reverend Laws, murdered prostitute Janice, and the rent boy BJ who acts as a catalyst for much of what happens. Themes, storylines, and characters overlap throughout the books (and sometimes within a single Joycian block of text), and the plot arc over the length of the series largely follows Forster’s dictum of ‘always connect’. Unexplained and half mysterious happenings and seemingly disparate characters and events in the first novels are seen from a fresh perspective in the latter novels with a realization that everything fits together (almost – there are frustrating issues that remain unresolved), engendering in the reader the same feeling as when you get a piece of sky from a jigsaw to finally slot into place after trying to hammer it into the sea for two days. Even if you don’t like the picture you end putting together.
The hallmarks of Peace’s distinctive writing style in the novels is the brevity of his sentences and paragraphs. Punchy and concise. Add to this strong imagery and a poetic structure to the chapters, and it’s all slick and modern. The poetry sections of the prose are largely good, and reasonably accessible, occasionally veering towards the psycadelic, and every now and then slightly annoying. Large chunks of text are frequently repeated as refrains, sometimes embellished as the story progresses (chronologically or not), other times not. These constant refrains can get wearing and occasionally serve to dilute the thrust of Peace’s narrative, but in other instances the repetition chimes back in like a chorus and underlines what’s happening and who it’s happening to.
Where Peace scores big time is using this tight style in his fictionalisation of real people and events. The (West) Yorkshire references are excellent with the sense of the past and reality tangible. Anyone who was brought up in the West Riding around that time (as I was) can identify with what’s happening and how it relates to real life. [And Peace brings to life] the depressing, smoke-blackened houses (always that sad yellow stone in West Yorkshire), frequently raining, and some faulty people struggling through the economic depression of the 70s and 80s. Looming over it all the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper, the bogeyman from Peace’s childhood. Peace takes this reality and shared past, and then shapes it and the people involved to his own purposes. This is a chronological conjuring trick that he shares with Jake Arnott and his time-hopping gangster tales from the Smoke.
Through a subtle use of popular culture touchstones – the Ford Cortina in the drive, the Bay City Rollers pumping out of a transistor radio – Peace creates a sense of the past, and peels back another layer of interest for the reader by them being able to identify with the places and the dates. For anyone who’s interested in tracing the footstep of the books many of the places are still there. The Griffin Hotel that features heavily in the novels is even more decrepit. You can still see the old hotel name on the clock face three storeys up, looking down on Boar Lane like a housebound old bloke, the ground floor’s now a down-market bar for scuffers, with some kind of citrus theme; the Strafford just off the Bull Ring in Wakefield’s still a pub (I expect they had to change the carpet upstairs after the massacre), so is the Horse and Jockey further up the road across from the Army recruiting – always looked a dive. This weight of cultural and social expression is remarkable and a great literary achievement.
However where the series seriously falls down is in its almost total lack of humour. Says Peace: ‘Crimes happen in actual, specific places at actual, specific times to actual, specific people. Crimes, their victims and their perpetrators, sadly define the times in which we live. There is no puzzle, only pain. No humour, only horror.’ Hmmm. I don’t agree with the last part of this statement at all. Yeah, fair enough, crime fiction should do more than simply entertain (though I’m quite up for being entertained every now and then) and create more than a written version of Cluedo, and real crime is dark and often heartbreaking and frequently makes you f*****g furious. But if you’re going to write about crime and the people associated with it (on a professional basis, at least) – coppers (and by extension, journalists) – and in this aim for realism, then you have to realize that, understandably or not, they don’t (ostensibly) take everything to heart that they encounter in their working lives, and that while yes the police force can be a cesspit of politics, twilight morals and compromised half-measures there is also a strong seam of camaraderie between clutches of bobbies who go about their jobs with pragmatism and a sense of ambivalence about the way people live their lives and the weirdness they deal with. You shouldn’t expect your characters to sympathise with your personal perspective on the world and follow the route that you would take in the same circumstances, which ultimately Peace does. Jack Whitehead becomes David Peace rather than David Peace becoming Jack Whitehead, same with Hunter, Dunford and Pigott. You’re shit, I’m shit, we’re all shit, so why should I f*****g bother? That seems to be the basic philosophy. Each one of the main voices is totally f****d by the end of their particular book and the general landscape is grim and pessimistic. Nobody laughs – ever.
This lack of balance is highlighted by its contrast with one shiny golden nugget of humour in a passage that says more to me about life under Thatcher than three pages of cut and paste stream of consciousness. It comes in ‘Nineteen Eighty-three’ thanks to the warping mind of John Pigott (not that I think much about the moral rectitude of defence solicitors) and leaps from the page in a way that would have made the rest of the books so much better:
The drive out in the rain –Quality.
The deserted spaces as depressing as the houses and buildings between them –
Jimmy Young kissing Thatcher’s arse on the radio, the cum drying in his Y-fronts as members of the Great British Public call in:-
‘Wurzel Gummidge?’ repeats Jimmy with a snigger. ‘That’s not very nice, is it?’
‘No, Jimmy, it’s not,’ you shout alone in your car. ‘And neither are you, you thick greedy old c**t. But we’ll not forget you and your cruel ways, not when we’re ‘round your house to do the Mussolini.’
Peace is now reading out a section about Orgreave, the coking plant by the M1 between Rotherham and Sheffield where Miners’ fought a pitched battle with the police on 18th June 1984 . I listen to the Mohammad Ali prose and I’m wondering what someone from West Yorkshire has to say about the strike. The county is after all – second only to Nottinghamshire – Scab country. More than half of the West Yorkshire miners went back to work long before the NUM had called off the strike, crossing the picket lines in order to pay for the new Vauxhall Chevette, their wives’ permanent waves and the holiday in Benidorm. Peace’s characters are being chased by the police, portrayed as Thatcher’s thugs – which, of course, they were. Illegal use of force for political ends.
I watched them grab this one lad. I watched them beat him to ground. I watched them jump up and down on him. Big black boots on his chest. Up and down. Up and down. They were animals – Let loose by government. Free to do what the f**k they wanted – They had got away with every single thing they’d tried. There’d be no going back now – No rights for ordinary folk now.Margaret Thatcher and her mob well and truly f****d up the coalfield communities. And their arrogance is best summed up in Bernard Ingham’s response to how he thought Conservative policy had affected the people of South Yorkshire: ‘Well it’s certainly greener than it used to be.’ There’s only one word to describe a man that can come out with a statement like that, it begins with ‘c’ and I’ll leave you to decide.
GB84 is constructed in two sections. A day to day diary of the consciousness of two striking miners, and then the main narrative, which is split into the free indirect thoughts of various other players on both sides of the dispute. Scargill, McGregor and most of the main players make appearances in one ‘occult’ form or another. It’s not an easy read. Peace’s prose style doesn’t facilitate a great deal of rapid page turning. Heavy in imagery and clipped sentences, it has the flavour of modern poetry about it. Even the long descriptive narrative parts. Which can get a bit tiring, and in such heavy doses sometimes weakens its impetus and doesn’t convey as much as it could. Anyone looking for Keith Waterhouse novel brought through the Miners’ Strike and written for the 21st Century will be disappointed. In many ways Peace’s the plotting and purpose of GB84 reads like a Frederick Forsyth novel; black budgets and conspiracy. The title declares its real interest – the conspiracy of Right Wing forces which shadowed the Harold Wilson government of the 1970s, and those forces operating in the dark corners of the Thatcher regime. The only real closeness to the Strike comes in the chapters openings when diaries from two striking miners chronicle the day to day experiences of ordinary miners. Aside from a sense of treachery that the rest of the book conveys, it is the diary section that for me is the novels main strength. The other characters – Terry, Neil, the Mechanic etc – remain shadowy, I don’t care about them or for them. They’re cogs, that’s all. Peter and Martin, on the other hand, do matter for me. That’s what I read it for.
The last fifty pages or so of the book are the best. When the machinations start to hit home, and what defeat means becomes palpable – particularly Peace’s portrayal of National Union of Mineworkers’ leader Arthur Scargill.
‘When history examines this dispute,’ railed the President, ‘there will be a glaring omission – the fact that the trade union movement has been standing on the sidelines while this Union has been battered.’Good as it is in many ways, I’m not sure GB84 manages to do what Scargill thought.
Wednesday 13th October 2004
For a article by David Peace on David Peace have a squint at:
http://www.crimetime.co.uk/features/davidpeace.html
For an alternative view on the Yorkshire Ripper click along to:
http://www.yorkshireripper.co.uk/hyper/preface.htm
For an overview on the Miners’ Strike stand up and be counted at:
http://www.shu.ac.uk/services/lc/people/underm~1/intro.htm
For an interesting piece about Jake Arnott:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/0%2C6000%2C476374%2C00.html
All quotations in this article are for the purposes of review, study or criticism.
