It is a September evening in Tokyo and David Peace is at home, enjoying the calm after a quite literal storm. "We had a typhoon all day, and it's a holiday. So it's been quite strange. The city just battened down the hatches. Everyone has got cabin fever."
The changeable weather seems an appropriate reflection of 46-year-old Peace's last few weeks. He is currently recuperating after an exhausting month-long tour of Britain to promote his ninth novel, Red or Dead - a propulsive, almost percussive character study of Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of Liverpool FC from 1959 to 1974 known as "Crazy Horse". "It was, go to bed, wake up at four, get to the next place. When I came back home, I would drift off to sleep and dream I was on stage unable to find which page to read."
Peace's schedule was punishing, but the torrent of words that pour from him for over an hour suggest he has not wearied of discussing his latest work. This enthusiasm offers a fair impression of Shankly himself, or at least the version that graces Red or Dead. Both are eloquent to the point of loquacity, and both share fierce work ethics. Both are intelligent and intense, but also blessed with a keen wit. When I ask Peace about possible similarities, for example, he laughs. "The only time I was consciously aware was when I learnt he laid the breakfast table the night before. I do that. My dad does it too. When I wake up I like to get on with the day and get on with work. I don't really like Sundays and holidays."
The final piece of common ground is that both are highly successful in their respective fields. Shankly guided Liverpool from Second Division anonymity to win every major football prize, bar the European Cup - which Liverpool won two years after his retirement with essentially Shankly's team.
Peace was one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists of 2003, and has won the prestigious James Tait Memorial Prize for 2004's GB84. Red or Dead will only enhance Peace's reputation as one of Britain's most ambitious, versatile and popular novelists. Whether he is writing about his home county of Yorkshire or his adopted city of Tokyo, he is equally adept at portraying the interior lives of driven men. A typical Peace plot delights in delivering sudden shocks to these individuals: the stomach-churning serial killings of the Yorkshire Ripper (the "Red Riding" quartet), the bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War (Tokyo Year Zero), or one man's single-minded, if futile attempt to win over a contemptuous set of fans (The Damned Utd).
It was this audacious novel from 2006 that facilitated Peace's ascent from critical darling to international bestseller - a rise that was boosted by a movie adaptation starring Michael Sheen. A vivid, often torrid account of football manager Brian Clough's ill-fated 44 days at Leeds United in 1974, it pushed Peace towards the mainstream, albeit on his own terms.
Red or Dead refines this blending of art and life for new purposes. "The reason I always write novels is that it's bound to be fiction. I wasn't there, I didn't know Shankly. I was painting a portrait from other people's memories." The ostensible subject may be football once again, but Liverpool's rise shines a light on a backdrop of post-war Britain: The Beatles, the Winter of Discontent, defeat for the left-wing Labour party and the arrival of Thatcherism.
As the novel builds through Peace's repeated motifs (the individual matches, Shankly's compulsive rituals, his relationships with family, players, rivals and fans), it becomes a moving, but unsentimental meditation on time, work, ageing and death. At the end of the day, to quote the cliché, football remains central. "You can't write about his retirement if you don't know what the work was. Football was Bill Shankly."
Peace's signature use of repetition is hard to miss. Nevertheless, he insists that he didn't impose his style on Red or Dead, but allowed it to emerge from the subject at hand. 'When Shankly retired, he said that football was a river - it was relentless, it was hard, there was no stepping out of it and there was no pausing. That quote informed the style. Writing in the minutest detail reflected that Shankly did everything in that manner. Every game matters, every training session matters, every detail matters. He answered every supporter's letter. If he was polishing his shoes, they were going to be the most polished shoes you had ever seen."
After Shankly's resignation, these routines contract in ever decreasing circles. For example, the bravura eight-page description of Shankly washing his car and mowing the lawn. Narrated in unsparing detail, his prose risks our boredom to enact Shankly's feelings of emptiness about life after football. What makes the scene almost unbearably poignant are echoes of a younger and eminently vital Shankly in his first week as Liverpool manager, meticulously clearing a training pitch of weeds, stones and shards of broken glass.
"He washes the car, but he only does it the once," Peace says wryly. "You don't get the repetition of him washing it every week, which I could have done. But that huge slab of text, that is retirement for Shankly - the shadow that always hangs over him. That sense of loss."
The project took some courage to even consider given that The Damned Utd's fictional recasting of real people and events caused furore. There were rumours of discontent among Brian Clough's surviving relatives. One of Leeds' most famous players, John Giles, threatened lawsuits for his portrayal in Peace's book: "There was one moment when it looked like I was going to be personally culpable for the £150,000 worth of psychological damages I had supposedly inflicted on him."
Peace is understandably reluctant to revisit these subjects or to discuss what amounts to unsubstantiated rumours. But he does suggest a line between the quiet but positive reception afforded the novel and the rancour that trailed the subsequent cinema adaptation. "Usually it's the author who distances themselves from the film. This time it was the film which distanced itself from the author."
Where Red or Dead was concerned, neither Peace nor his publishers were taking any chances. "Before we announced the book, I wrote to the Shankly family saying I was writing a book about their grandfather, that he was a man I admired, and that the book was intended to be a celebration of his life and work. I found him inspirational. I was at pains to point out that they might not like the book, but that wasn't my intention."
Shankly's story is certainly more unambiguously heroic than that of Clough at Leeds. He may not have been Liverpool's most successful manager - his trophy haul would be eclipsed by Bob Paisley, his successor and disciple - but he is undeniably their most beloved. "No other manager had such a bond with the supporters. Brian Clough didn't, Bob Paisley didn't, even Alex Ferguson didn't have it."
For Peace, Red or Dead allowed him to strike an ultimately positive note after years examining the bleakest recesses of human experience. "I felt I had written so many dark books about crime and corruption, politics, power and its abuses, without offering any constructive alternative. This was something I felt quite strongly about. I wrote the Red Riding books, GB84 or the Tokyo books as critiques of the society in which they took place not to wallow in the darkness."
Peace hopes that Red or Dead will help him complete his Tokyo books - in much the same way that writing The Damned Utd had allowed him to begin them. He confesses it has been a struggle, however, one that required moving house halfway across the world only to move all the way back again. Again like Shankly, Peace has lived most of his adult life outside his homeland. Shankly was a proud Scot who spent his best years working in the north of England: Huddersfield before Liverpool. Peace swapped the north of England in 1994 for Japan. In 2009, he returned to his hometown of Ossett, West Yorkshire.
"I had an idea that it would be great to write [the final Tokyo novel] outside of Japan in the way I had written the Red Riding books outside of England. Once I was back in West Yorkshire, I found it really difficult. I had been out of England for 20 years so there was a big readjustment. After a year and the book still wasn't coming, I began to get really quite worried. We decided to move back. I missed Tokyo. More than that, I missed the rhythm and routine of writing I couldn't replicate in England."
Peace is already nearing the end of the Tokyo trilogy and planning future novels about the British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, and the cricketing legend Geoffrey Boycott. He remains a passionate football fan from afar (he supports Huddersfield Town), but is concerned that Shankly's legacy of attracting young supporters onto the legendary Kop has been squandered by modern football's obsession with money. Peace recalls meeting a group of teenage Liverpudlians during the recent book tour. They had all heard of Bill Shankly, but only one had actually seen a match at Anfield.
"It just seemed so sad. He was so proud of going but had only been once. And here we were talking about Shankly. It would have broken his heart."
James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.
Bill Shankly and Liverpool FC the subject of latest David Peace novel
The British author David Peace talks to James Kidd about his new novel on the legendary Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly
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