Why the plural? There’s only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the slushy runway where British European Airways flight 609 crashes on February 6, 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spend their first bewildered night; the hospital where their fellow passengers recover – or don’t. This is surely the story of one accident, one time, one team: the air crash that killed 23 out of 44 passengers, including eight of Manchester United’s players, three of its staff, and eight journalists.
But Peace’s reasoning becomes clear over the several hundred pages of this relentless, electrifying, harrowing novel. The Munich Air Disaster, so integral a part of how the football club developed, and which had such a profound impact on the city, the north of England, the sporting community and the country as a whole, might easily not have happened had takeoff been aborted. And what would the world look like then?
