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It can't happen often in a novelist's career that a major film and a television series based on his books appear at the same time, scripted by Britain's most sought after dramatists and brought to life by some of our most talented actors. This is David Peace's week.
Last night Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall took to the red carpet in Leicester Square for the premiere of the Brian Clough drama The Damned United, adapted by Peter Morgan from Peace's novel of the same name. The portrait of football's great iconoclast is one of the most eagerly awaited films of the year.
Tonight, Channel 4 concludes its highly acclaimed TV trilogy Red Riding, based on Peace's bleakly violent crime novels set in the Seventies and Eighties - a piece of television likened by critics in tone and ambition to The Wire, and already tipped to sweep the awards board this year. Its ensemble cast includes some of our hottest actors, including David Morrissey, Sean Bean, Rebecca Hall, Paddy Considine and impressive newcomer Andrew Garfield. An author could hardly wish for a higher profile, or for two more classy projects to appear under his name.
Pictures: The Damned United premiere
Film review: The Damned United
By rights, Peace should be feeling very pleased with himself. In fact, when I speak to him, he sounds rather bruised. Controversy still swirls around The Damned United, a vivid retelling of Clough's 44-day reign at Leeds United in 1974. Clough's widow Barbara and his three children have made known their bitter opposition to both book and movie, despite refusing to watch the film and, reportedly, having read just pages of the novel. Indeed, they hold the book "in abhorrence" - as do many of the footballers portrayed in it - and object in the strongest terms to the hard-swearing, booze-swilling, paranoia-fuelled portrait of Clough painted by Peace. (Objectively, it should be said, Old Big 'Ead, as Clough was known, emerges as nothing less than a mouthy hero.)
But Peace, 41, did not want to cause such trouble. His book, a stylistic tour-de-force as much as a feat of research, combines fact with fiction in potentially risky ways (as do all his books except the first) but he never laid claims to complete accuracy.
"The Damned United is very clearly a novel," he says cautiously, with broad Yorkshire vowels. "It's written in a literary manner, some might even say, a pretentious manner." He laughs, nervously. "I think you'd be hard pushed to mistake it for a biography. That would be like mistaking a painting for a photo. And I can honestly say with my hand on my heart that it was never any attempt at character assassination. As I wrote the book, I was very conscious that my admiration and respect for Brian Clough was just growing and growing. Of course, I'm upset if I've caused distress to the family."
Later, he sounds a little less contrite. Peace has written eight novels in 10 years, including a quartet of books based around brutality in the West Yorkshire police force and the fall-out from the Yorkshire Ripper murders, one set during the miners' strike of 1984 and another in post-war Japan.
"When you write about corruption in a police force, when you write about the miners' strike and the surrender and defeat of Japan, you expect those subjects to be difficult and controversial," he says. "It's a bit of a surprise to me that the only book to raise tempers and cause controversy is about a football manager. To me that's slightly sad." In fact, he hasn't even seen the film yet. For the past 15 years, Peace has lived with his wife and two children in Tokyo and the DVD sent to him by the film-makers won't work on his Japanese TV.
Yet David Peace is still the man of the moment. For years he has been one of the UK's foremost crime writers, but also something of a well kept secret: in literary circles, he is talked about in the same breath as James Ellroy and Ian Rankin. The harshness of his vision and terseness of his prose are unrelenting, and in the Red Riding quartet - all located in West Yorkshire and named after the years in which they are set, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 - he has captured a sober, gritty zeitgeist that fits perfectly with a contemporary desire for hard-hitting realism. Inevitably comparisons have been drawn with the BBC hit Life on Mars, another tale of Seventies machismo and vice, but Peace doesn't think the two are similar at all. "I really don't want to evoke nostalgia for that time," he says. "No one would want to go back to those racist, misogynistic times, would they? It was dreadful, horrible, awful."
His first novel, 1974, about the murder of a 10-year-old girl (in C4's version starring Andrew Garfield and Sean Bean) certainly does portray a "horrible" time. But its publication was a long-time coming. Peace claims to have had work rejected by "every publisher and every agent in the UK" - and some of those publishers requested that he never send work to them again. That was 20 years ago, and Peace, then unemployed and living in Manchester, resorted to endless afternoons in the cinema and to "two-litre bottles of red wine" in an effort to forget his ambition.
"I've always written from a very early age," he says, "and there was just no question that I'd really stop, even if I was only writing for myself." He grew up in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, the son of two teachers, and a big football fan. The first match he ever went to was Huddersfield versus Leeds, then managed by Clough. "I remember vividly him getting off the coach and being very chatty, and ruffling my hair when all the kids gathered round him."
Another strong childhood memory is of the dark shadow cast over his world by Yorkshire Ripper murders; and his nightmarish and quite genuine belief that his own mother might become a Ripper victim. Peace has always been obsessed by the churning fear of that time. "There were some sunny days," he jokes. "It wasn't always raining and there weren't always murders but growing up in Yorkshire at the time of the Ripper did make a huge impression on me. Maybe I got it out of proportion but I don't think I was the only one. Thousands of people were enormously affected by it."
His sister would pray aloud at night, asking God to save their mother from the murderer. For a while, having been told that the Ripper was "somebody's husband, somebody's son", Peace even wondered whether his father could be the culprit - "I felt a tremendous relief when the so-called Ripper tape was released and appeared to prove that it wasn't."
In 1992, he "fled" - his word - the UK and started teaching English in Istanbul. "You didn't need a proper TEFL qualification there and it was cheap," he says. "To be honest I was running away from trying to write as well. I worked three jobs. I left my hostel at 6am and didn't get back till after midnight. There was no time to write, and that's exactly what I wanted."
Two years later, he decided to go to Japan, again to teach English - and here, suddenly, Peace found his voice. He began to focus not on the great Northern novel but on the small detail and imagined horror of the world in which he grew up. For hours he locked himself in a tiny room in his Tokyo flat and immersed himself in police reports and newspaper stories of astonishing violence.
"1977 and 1980 [the Ripper novels] were very hard to write in terms of the research," he says. "I was dealing with horrific crime that had happened to real people. It sounds dramatic but it was very hard not to feel emotional." At the same time, he got married to his Japanese girlfriend - they bonded over Seventies punk, he says - and had two children. His daughter Emi is now eight, and his son George 11. "Looking back, having children was really good for my psychological health. I'd come out of that room and chat to Emi about High School Musical, or whatever the fad was then. I'd watch a football match with George. Football is still one of the few ways in which I relax." (To his father's horror, George has become a Manchester United fan. "He thinks he's named after George Best but actually he's named after George Orwell.")
The submersion in such dark material taught Peace a valuable and perhaps surprising lesson, he claims. He detests violence in films and novels when it's presented solely as a form of entertainment, even as titillation, and he hates much of Hollywood's crime output.
"I'm aware that I'm open to charges of hypocrisy here," he says, carefully, when I question the cold brutality of Red Riding. "But it seems to me you don't need to make crimes any more sadistic or violent than they are in real life. It's something that I really thought about when I was researching the Ripper case, and when I thought about the immense suffering of the victims' families. If you're going to write about these things, you have to do it for a better reason than simply to entertain or to make money. And for me, it's to understand why these crimes took place, and also to show that suffering."
Peace's new novel, the second of his Japanese books, Tokyo Occupied City, is out this summer. Meanwhile, he and his family have decided to move back to England and will leave Japan next month. Is he nervous about his reception from the Yorkshire Tourist Board?
"Ha. The people of Yorkshire have always been very warm to me, actually. I'm slightly more rattled at the prospect of meeting irate Brian Clough fans." He did not walk the red carpet last night, however. "I was asleep," he says. "It was another normal working day and then I went to bed. At the moment all this fuss seems slightly unreal to me. I guess that might change when I finally get home."
* The Damned United is released on 27 March; the concluding instalment of Red Riding is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm. David Peace's latest novel, Tokyo Occupied City, is published by Faber in August.
Pictures: The Damned United premiere
Film review: The Damned United
Reader views (1)
Having watched the two episodes of the trilogy so far I am denying myself the potential boredom of the third.Watching the internecine brutal struggles of the police without any compensating humanity in the characters renders them faceless and unmemorable. The plotting was so elephantine that if it hadnt been for the sporadic violent episodes somnolence would have assailed me.Such a dank dark contrast to the current Botswana series on BBC.
- Sam Duncan, England, 19/03/2009 12:56
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