In reply to Fraser:
Mark Lawson in the Grauniad went on about this style at some length and his comments bear repeating:
"Red or Dead also continues a wider stylistic gamble launched in the writer's earlier books. It is a principle of most teaching and criticism of fiction that prose should contain as much variation of vocabulary, rhythm and reference as possible. For example, a character introduced on one page as "Shankly" would ideally become "he" at the next mention and perhaps "the manager" after that.
This rule of elegant variation has generally been ignored by Peace. Here, for instance, is the protagonist of Red or Dead at home with his wife: "Bill got up from his chair. Bill kissed Ness on the cheek. And Bill said, Goodnight, love."
Those sentences are typical of the style. Opening the book at random, I find, on page 249, 50 repetitions of "Bill". Certain other formulations echo through the more than 700 pages of Red or Dead. Almost every game at Liverpool's regular ground is noted as being "at home, at Anfield", while Bill is on uncountable occasions to be found at home "in the night and in the silence" and is often consulting there "his book of names, his book of notes".
This rhythm of reiteration, which imposes on fiction a tactic more associated with poetry, is also present in the linking prose ("Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were concerned. Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley were worried") and even extends to the dialogue. Characteristically, giving his team talk before a game against Manchester United, the manager tells his troops that the opposition boss "is always on the phone to me, asking if any of you are on offer, available for transfer. I know for a fact he'd take any one of you, any one of you, boys. Because they are a makeshift side, this side today. A makeshift United." (Oddly, though, Shankly doesn't double-talk like this in the broadcasting scenes, which are based on recordings.)
With earlier books, some furious online reader-reviewers seemed to be under the impression that Peace doesn't realise that he is doing this hypnotic repetition. Clearly, though, it is a calculation and, in Red or Dead, is at its most effective and thematically justified. Shankly was a monomaniac – author of the still-quoted observation that football isn't a matter of life and death, but more important than that – whose training methods relied on drills being endlessly duplicated.
Peace's controversial echo-chamber style exactly suggests a mind and a life moving through – and sometimes stuck in – a shallow groove, seeing no other routes. In this context, the nine detailed pages devoted to the retired Shankly carrying out household chores ("Bill held the cloth over the water in the bucket. Bill wrung out the cloth") achieve a perfect mimesis of the condition of an obsessive seeking a replacement fixation."
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/08/red-dead-david-peace-review?IN...
