Peace, man

Gosh, I haven't blogged for ages. Not that it matters, but I was busy looking for flats to move to, and then moving, and then unpacking, and shit. Plus I had one of those periodical crises of confidence where I faced up to the sheer pointlessness of writing stuff that nobody will read, and that isn't really good enough for wider consumption in any case. But hey ho, let's press on.

David Peace has been flavour of the month lately (or at least he was last month when I probably should have written this). I'd read The Damned United early last year and had the intention of checking out his earlier books, but I knew that Red Riding was a chronological quartet and my local library never had 1974 on the shelves. Therefore I watched the excellent TV films and only then did I bit the bullet and buy the four books in one fell swoop.

I'm glad I did things in that order, because as intense and visceral as the films are, they are small beer compared to the relentless headfuck of Peace's prose. Somehow Peace has the ability to meld stream of consciousness rants, dreamlike sequences and conversational fragments into one disturbing yet compelling whole. It's a monstrous cliche to say a book is unputdownable (unless the pages were coated with superglue, I suppose), but it was incredibly frustrating to have to stop reading these things at any point.

Of course Damned United is written in much the same style, just with added psychological anguish replacing the graphic violence and depravity. For the film version, Peter Morgan opted to turn the basic story into a much more affectionate romp, a kind of love story between Clough and his assistant Peter Taylor at heart. This was probably a wise decision, considering the trouble Peace got into with his portrayal of Cloughie in the book, and the film works well on its own merits.

I would pity the poor bugger who, having seen the film, goes out and buys the book expecting a similarly warm nostalgia-fest though. Surely doing a film tie-in version when the book is this different to the film is tantamount to false advertising? Much like an author of such angry, demented material being called Peace, really.