Simon Pearson

David Peace’s Munichs

March 18, 2025

David Peace’s Munichs is not just a novel about the Munich air disaster, it is a novel about how tragedy lingers, how history is shaped in grief and uncertainty, and how disaster, in the absence of instant news, once unfolded in echoes and silence.

A People’s History of Grief

‘This is it, thrown up, around and into darkness, darkness –’ (Munichs).

David Peace has spent his career writing about English history from inside its darkest moments. His great subject is how trauma lingers, not just in individuals but in communities, in places, in the texture of daily life. His Red Riding quartet made the Yorkshire Ripper years feel less like a crime story than a fever dream, a nation rotting from the inside. GB84 reimagined the miners’ strike as a political thriller where the real enemy was never in doubt. And now, with Munichs, Peace returns to the North, not to corruption or political warfare, but to a tragedy that left a permanent mark on Manchester, on football, on English memory itself.

Yet for all its power, Munichs, like Red or Dead before it, has to live in the shadow of The Damned Utd. Peace’s first football novel remains his most complete, his most perfectly realised. There, he did something remarkable: he got inside Brian Clough’s head, found the rhythm of his voice, his insecurities, his bravado, his paranoia. He did the same with Peter Taylor, showing their toxic dependence on one another, the perfect double act undone by its own contradictions. The novel was docudrama in written form, but that makes it sound lifeless, like an exercise in style. It wasn’t. It was inhabited. It pulsed with the manic energy of Clough himself, with the rise and fall of a man who could not help but self-destruct. It was the perfect fusion of history and fiction, and Peace has spent two football books since trying to match it.

Red or Dead, his novel about Bill Shankly, took the opposite approach. Where The Damned Utd was claustrophobic, obsessive, a psychological breakdown on the page, Red or Dead was expansive, methodical, obsessive in a different way. It mimicked Shankly’s own rhythms, his way of seeing football as ritual, as duty. Some found it hypnotic; others found it unreadable. It was a bold novel, but not one that captured the mind of its subject in the way The Damned Utd did.

And now Munichs, which once again takes a different path. There is no single perspective here. No single voice. The novel is a fractured account of grief, told from multiple angles, the players who survived, the wives who waited for news, the fans, the officials, the journalists filing copy as the truth comes in fragments. If The Damned Utd was about obsession, Munichs is about shock. It is about the way disaster ripples outward, the way it spreads through a city, through a nation.

The Damned Utd remains his most perfect novel, the one where his style and subject clicked into place. But Munichs proves that, even when Peace is not at his best, he is still writing about history in a way no one else is.

Question the Legend?

The Munich air disaster is one of English football’s most mythologised tragedies. The Busby Babes exist in the national imagination as something pure, a lost future, a team of promise cruelly cut down before they could fulfil their potential. Unlike The Damned Utd, where Peace tore into Clough’s legend to reveal a man consumed by ego and insecurity, or GB84, where he dismantled the idea that the miners’ strike was ever winnable, Munichs does not interrogate the myth in quite the same way.

This is not to say that Peace romanticises the past, his prose is too raw, too unrelenting for nostalgia, but he does not deconstruct the Busby Babes as he did Clough, Shankly, or the strikers. The novel does not explore whether any footballing ideal could ever have lived up to what the Babes became in memory. There is no attempt to suggest that this team, like all great teams, was flawed in ways that would have surfaced over time. Instead, Munichs is a novel of grief, of lives abruptly cut short, of history’s what-ifs left permanently unanswered.

Peace does not ask whether the Babes would have become what they were supposed to be, because in this novel, they never get the chance. There is no alternative history, only the crash, only the loss.

Disaster Before the Information Age

“They said it was fine. Said they’d be back tonight. That’s what they said.” (Munichs)

But it wasn’t fine. And they weren’t coming back. In Munichs, the crash is not a single moment but a rolling wave of misinformation, half-truths, and mistaken reports. This was a disaster before the information age, before real-time updates, before breaking news tickers. What people knew, they knew in fragments, passed from voice to voice, distorted by distance, by fear, by the simple fact that no one had all the answers.

Peace captures this slow, creeping horror. The moment when reassurance turns to doubt, when certainty evaporates. There is no instant verification, no official statement hitting millions of screens at once. Instead, there are only rumours. The wrong names. The wrong numbers. Families believing, for hours, that their sons and husbands were safe, until they weren’t.

Compare this to how disasters unfold today: the flood of immediate images, the live footage, the too-much-information, too-fast-to-process overload. Munichs belongs to another time. A time when tragedy arrived in pieces, when absence was the only proof of loss. Peace does not just write about grief, he writes about the not knowing, about the moment before the truth becomes inescapable.

Why the North?

There are writers who set books in the North, and then there is David Peace, who writes the North, its people, its histories, its language. There is something in his work that could only come from someone who knows these places, who has heard these voices before. Peace is from West Yorkshire, and because he is of the North, he understands the rhythm of its language, not just its words, but the way people speak, the cadence, the pauses, the things left unsaid.

Munichs, like GB84, like Red Riding, is a novel written to the patterns of Northern speech, repetitive, looping, rhythmic. It captures the way grief is spoken, the way bad news is repeated, how it echoes through a community:

‘There are no survivors.’
‘Some survivors. Some survivors.’ (Munichs)

The North in Peace’s novels is not just a backdrop. It is a way of speaking, remembering, enduring. His characters do not give long monologues about what has happened to them. They repeat. They circulate stories. They say nothing until they have to say everything at once.

This is why Munichs works where the Tokyo Trilogy did not. In Tokyo, Peace was a visitor. His prose imitated the voices of post-war Japan, but it never quite felt them in the way GB84 or Munichs feel the voices of the North. Here, his writing is inside the grief, inside the silences, inside the ways people in Manchester talk about tragedy. He understands that history, when it is personal, is not always spoken in full sentences. Sometimes it is half-whispered in a phone box:

‘It’s our Bobby, isn’t it?’ (Munichs)

Or misheard on the radio:

‘Only ten left. Only ten survivors.’ (Munichs)

Or muttered in disbelief at Old Trafford:

‘The plane has crashed. A lot of people have died.’ (Munichs)

Because Peace is from the North, he does not just write about it, he writes as it.

Fate vs. Systems

**Is Munichs Peace’s First Novel Without an Enemy?**

Much of David Peace’s work is about systems of power, corrupt police (Red Riding), government and union betrayals (GB84), the football establishment (The Damned Utd). His novels usually expose a structure beneath the surface, an institution that exerts control over the lives of his characters. In GB84, the miners do not just lose; they are defeated by an organised state machine that infiltrates their ranks and starves them out. In Red Riding, evil is not just individual, it is systemic, embedded in the police, the press, and the political class. Even The Damned Utd, ostensibly about football, is also about the establishment of the game, the old guard that Clough fights against and ultimately cannot defeat.

But Munichs is different. There is no villain, no conspiracy, no institution causing the suffering. There is just fate. A plane fails to take off. A team is wiped out. And the survivors are left to live with it.

**Is There a System in Munichs?**

At first glance, Munichs appears to be the novel where Peace finally writes a tragedy without an enemy. But that is not entirely true. The system is there, it is just quieter, lurking in the background.

For one, there is the footballing institution itself. The crash happened because Manchester United had pushed to compete in Europe, despite the FA’s reluctance. English football in the 1950s was still inward-looking, slow to embrace European competition. Busby’s United were pioneers, the first English team to take on the best in Europe. The decision to charter a flight in the middle of a brutal winter schedule was driven by modern footballing ambition. The club, the authorities, the competition, they all played a role in the conditions that led to Munich. The crash was not inevitable, but it was a consequence of decisions made within a structure.

Then there is the system of media and myth-making. The Busby Babes were not just a football team; they were a story, a symbol of post-war hope, of youth, of a new kind of English football. And when they died, the system moved quickly to turn them into something even greater: a legend. Peace does not interrogate this as explicitly as he does the mythology around Clough in The Damned Utd, but the machinery is there, the newspaper headlines, the club’s public mourning, the way Manchester United itself had to carry on.

And yet, Munichs does not rage against these forces. It does not argue that this was a crime, a betrayal, a scheme. Unlike in GB84 or Red Riding, the characters in Munichs do not fight back against a system that has destroyed them. They cannot. There is nothing to fight. The disaster has already happened.

A System That Cannot Be Blamed

This is what makes Munichs unique in Peace’s work. His characters are usually paranoid, angry, desperate to understand who is responsible. In GB84, the miners believe they are fighting the government; in Red Riding, journalists and detectives chase a conspiracy that runs through the highest levels of power. Even in The Damned Utd, Clough’s downfall is fuelled by his battle with the club directors, the FA, and the old-school football establishment.

But in Munichs, there is no one to blame. The players, the officials, the survivors, none of them can direct their grief toward anything. There is only silence.

This makes Munichs a novel not of resistance, but of acceptance. Peace’s usual mode is to write about men raging against systems, trying to fight back against a world that is stacked against them. But here, the men cannot do anything. They cannot undo the crash. They cannot fix what is broken. All they can do is survive.

The system is there, football’s ambition, the press’s myth-making, the club’s need to rebuild, but it is secondary. The defining force in Munichs is not power, not corruption, but something much older, something more untouchable: fate.

Men in David Peace’s Fiction

David Peace writes about men. There are women in his novels—there must be—but they rarely linger in the memory. This is not just because he focuses on male-dominated environments, but because his perspective is fundamentally male. He is not just writing about men; he is writing as men, from the inside out, inhabiting their thoughts, their rhythms, their ways of seeing the world.

This is particularly striking in Munichs, where the wives, mothers, and daughters of the Busby Babes must have played a central role in the real aftermath of the crash. Women were the ones waiting at the airport, making frantic phone calls, sitting by hospital beds. Their grief must have been as raw, as enduring, as life-altering as the players who survived. Yet in Peace’s telling, they are not central. Their suffering is present, but it is not the suffering he chooses to inhabit.

Even in moments when women should be at the heart of the story, Munichs remains a novel about how men process grief. Their grief is not spoken. It is buried in the body, in the way they sit, in the way they drink, in the way they do not talk about it. Peace is exceptional at capturing how men avoid confronting pain directly, how they fold tragedy into routine, how they endure

Football, Memory

and the Weight of the Past

David Peace does not just write about football; he writes about what football carries. In Munichs, the game is not a spectacle, not a contest to be won or lost, but a weight, a history people must live inside. The Busby Babes were not simply a great team; they became something more, something preserved in myth, in grainy black-and-white footage, in the rituals of remembrance that still exist at Old Trafford.

But to those who survived, they were not myth. They were teammates, friends, young men who never came home. The past is not something they can step out of. They wake up in hospital beds, still reaching for the men who are no longer there. The novel does not move towards resolution because there is none. The dead remain dead, the survivors remain survivors, and the game must somehow continue.

This is why Munichs refuses the redemption arc that football so often provides. The familiar story, tragedy, rebuilding, triumph, is absent. Peace does not take us to 1968, to the moment where Manchester United lifted the European Cup, a moment often framed as the club’s final act of healing. Instead, he leaves us in the wreckage. Because to those who lived through it, Munich was never something to be overcome. It was something that endured.

‘When Bobby opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the sky, the big, grey, dirty sky looking down on him, big black and white flakes of snow falling down on him.’ (Munichs)

Peace’s structure reflects this. His writing does not move forward; it loops, it repeats, just as trauma does. Some survivors. Some survivors. The book does not end with catharsis, only with echoes. And that is the point. History, in Peace’s telling, is not something that passes. It is something that persists.

Peace does not just write about history, he writes about how history feels for the people inside it. And the message of Munichs is that some moments do not fade. They return, again and again, reshaped, retold, but never truly gone.

This is why the book does not give us closure. It does not tell us how United rebuilt. It does not take us to Wembley in 1968. It leaves us in the snow, in the silence, in the uncertainty.

Because Peace’s message is simple:

Some things do not end.

They just echo.

Book Review, Books, Britain, Dave Peace, History