By TTT Subscriber John P. Houghton (John P Hughton).

This is a review of Red or Dead, David Peace's book about Bill Shankly. We've already carried one review, by Andrew McKay, but as Andrew's did, this has its own distinctive view of the novel:

Red or Dead, David Peace's new novel about the life of Bill Shankly is a love story – with a complicated ending.

Bill Shankly loved many things: Liverpool Football Club; his wife Nessie; hard work; the city of Liverpool; and the ethos of collective socialism that he saw reflected in the city and articulated in the words of 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

He had devoted his life to all these things and, as he lost some of the vigour of his youth and realised how much time he had missed with his wife and daughters, he decided to choose between his devotions.

He put his actual family before his footballing one, and shocked by the world by resigning from Liverpool Football Club.

What happens next is a story we all know. At least, we all think we know it.

The club turned its back on its greatest servant. After fifteen years of devotion, during which he turned a sleeping second division side into an emerging European giant, he was treated like a pariah.

In this telling of the story, Shankly becomes an almost semi-vagrant ghost living a sad half-life. Unwanted and eventually exorcised from Anfield, he drifted around, playing football with kids in the streets and even turning up to lend a hand at Goodison.

Peace's interpretation is more nuanced, and does Shankly a greater service. In Red or Dead, Shankly knows he can't hang around the club. He had seen the ultimately destructive impact of his good friend Matt Busby's decision to stay on and lend a hand at Old Trafford. The club couldn't move out of the shadow of the great man, and were relegated within a few years.

Shankly knew he had to make another sacrifice by staying away. The exile was self-imposed as much as anything else. He wanted his team to have a legacy beyond him – and that could only be achieved without him. This version gives Shankly a lot more credit than the traditional telling of the tale.

Resigning in 1974, Shankly was also walking away from a football world, and wider society, that was rapidly moving away from his vision of collective socialism. This is illustrated by the few points in novel in which the Shankly-focused narrative is punctuated by events in the outside world: Conservative election victories, the growth of hooliganism, urban decay, rising unemployment and economic crises. In a section that reads like a haunting premonition of Hillsborough, 66 Glasgow Rangers fans were crushed to death in an inadequate stadium.

"Liverpool is not in England"

A rich, round man emerges from Red or Dead.

We meet the hard Shankly, making cold-blooded decisions to offload players as he re-built his first great but ageing team (this hardness toward old and injured players was discussed in this episode of TAW with Ragnhild 'Ronnie' Lund Ansnes). We meet the philosophical Shankly, discussing politics at length in the transcribed interview with Harold Wilson near the end of the book.

We meet the deeply caring Shankly, traumatised by the suicide of club secretary of Jimmy McInnes, virtually begging his successor Peter Robinson to go home and get some rest. We meet the canny, manipulative Shankly, as demonstrated in an incident with a semi-naked Ian St. John, a tin of boot polish and a Polaroid camera (seriously, you'll have to read that bit for yourself).

The other great character in the book is the city of Liverpool, as represented by the voices on the Kop. Shankly saw his values reflected in the city. Socialism, although the city has not been as left-wing as people think, as Steve Graves discusses in the TAW Mag #2. Loyalty to a collective ambition. A determination to walk together and avoid what Martin Luther King described as the "drum major instinct", the selfish "desire to lead the parade" instead of walking lock-step in solidarity.

That's what the Kop's singing in Red or Dead seems to represent. Not just the ability to create a barrage of sound, but to reinforce the living bond between the players and crowd. No stars, no one bigger than the team, but a unity of purpose between the men on the field moving the ball and the men off it, moving the players with their voices.

Shankly repaid this with a deep commitment to the city. When asked by a journalist how he could love a city that appeared to be nothing but "huge tracts of wasteland", Shankly responded that he could only see "a