If ever there was a time to interest the American reading public in a 700-page novel about a real-life British soccer coach, it might just possibly be now, with David Beckham an A-list celebrity (and underwear model), and the 2014 World Cup underway.

The protagonist of “Red or Dead,” David Peace’s ninth novel, is Bill Shankly, who managed the Liverpool Football Club from 1959 to 1974, glory years that saw the team winning a cabinetful of trophies in England and Europe. Perhaps even more crucially, this era created the mythology of Liverpool supporters as the greatest football fans in the world. Like all mythologies, it’s debatable, but Peace’s novel is anything but iconoclastic. The love between manager and fans was real and thoroughly requited, and Peace is certainly a fan.

Shankly was a profoundly decent, honest and irony-free Scotsman: a proud, working-class man of the people and a former miner who once, if the novel is to be believed, denounced a hotel manager in Romania as “a disgrace to international socialism.” (This was hardly a clash of dialectics; the man had stolen the team’s supply of Coca-Cola.) Shankly was obsessive about football, with few interests outside the game. His life was scandal-free; he was a good, if often absent, husband and father. He was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said — all of which could make for a very dull novel. Peace combats this possibility with a prose style as curious as anything in contemporary fiction: a deadpan blend and pastiche of Zen poetry, Homeric epic and medieval saga, with elements from Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein. He used something similar in his novel “The Damned Utd,” but this book takes it to new extremes. Here’s a typical description of Shankly using his tableware to work out tactics:

“Bill stared at the bowls and the plates, the salt and pepper pots, the jars of honey and marmalade. Bill picked up the bowls and the plates, the salt and pepper pots, the jars of honey and marmalade. Bill moved the bowls and the plates, the salt and pepper pots, the jars of honey and marmalade to the edges of the cloth, to the sides of the table. Bill picked up the four forks and the four knives and the four spoons. . . .” This goes on for a few hundred words, and similar scenes occur throughout.

If you find this infuriating, as many readers surely will, wait until Peace starts describing the games themselves:

“On Tuesday 9 September, 1969, Sunderland Football Club came to Anfield, Liverpool. That evening, 46,370 folk came, too. In the 12th minute, Geoff Strong scored. And in the 34th minute, Tommy Smith scored. And Liverpool Football Club beat Sunderland Football Club two-nil. At home, at Anfield.”