Born Yesterday: the news as a novel by Gordon Burn

We’ve previously featured a review by contributor rashbre of Burn’s novel Alma Cogan. Burn ploughs a similar furrow with this one, a mixture of fact and factoid, fictional narrative techniques applied to the news of the day. Normal Mailer, in connection with his book on Marilyn Monroe called it faction.

I heard Burn discussing his book on the Simon Mayo programme on 5Live, though Mayo wasn’t present. It sounded interesting. The big news events of the past year, all woven together and narrated as one, as if the news was a novel. What’s not to like? This also reminds me of classic Don DeLillo, and books like Mao II and Libra: the narration of events, the eventhood of events, the nature of events, of news, the effect of narrative on events. This is right up my street: I wrote a PhD on just this topic.

Born Yesterday is brilliant: an astonishingly up-to-the-minute tour of our current obsessions, including the Madeleine McCann story, the attempted car-bombings in London last summer, the departure of Blair, the arrival of Brown. Even the Credit Crunch and Northern Rock get a mention. It’s all fresh in the mind, which is the point.

The novel begins with the puzzling and dislocating experience of seeing someone who was once so extraordinarily famous she was in/on the news almost every day for over a decade: Mrs Thatcher. I remember reading years ago about the poignant sight of Harold Wilson, reduced, shambling down the street in his Gannex coat with his pipe, tiny and anonymous, shrunken by the fact of his circumstances: gone, and actually forgotten. Will this happen to Blair? Politicians often try to feather their nests, provide a soft landing. The lecture tours, the books, the millions. Tony Blair took a job as a peace envoy instead. There’s a funny passage in Born Yesterday about Blair’s protection team, thinking they were in for a cushy retirement, guarding Blair on his rambles round the park; suddenly discovering they were going to have to brave car bombs and assassins in fucking Tel Aviv.

Mrs Thatcher, on the other hand, does have a habit of wandering round a park, pointing at things, petting dogs, the Harold Wilson of our times. What is it like, to see someone so famous without the media to mediate?

Everything is connected, nothing is connected. What are we supposed to think? Who tells us? Juxtaposition sometimes makes the news of the day seem portentous. Everything is connected, by the media: threads of electricity, lines of type, broadcast signals and static. Michel Serres pointed out that le parasite, the French word, had three meanings: noise on a signal, an organism, and a social pariah.

Newspapers mix news, commentary, speculation, feature stories, gossip, and criticism. Opinion disguised as fact, facts in short supply. Kate McCann, separated at birth from Heather Mills? Kate McCann: ice-maiden, doctor, milf, working class girl made good, media manipulator, photo opportunity, suspect. It all gets mixed together in your head and keeping it all separate is like trying to sort grains of sand.

Though short, at just over 200 pages, this book is dense, and full of long sentences which ramble and divert and leave you as confused as you’re supposed to be. How did we get here from there, by which route? The sentences begin in one place and leaves you in another. The paragraph starts with Blair and ends with the McCanns, or the terrorists, or the summer floods.

Excellent, highly recommended, but read it quick, while it’s all still fresh.

Never Fear by Scott Frost

I can’t remember why or when I picked this book up, but there it was on my shelf, and not yet read.

This is a US crime thriller in the vein of Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, also set in Los Angeles, but with a female protagonist/narrator in the form of Alex Delillo, a Lieutenant in the Pasadena PD. Unlike Bosch, Delillo has a positive relationship with her superior in Pasadena, and is very close to her current partner.

Just as the Bosch series have been sometimes critical of the Los Angeles PD (an easy target since the King case, after all), this novel pits Delillo against the LAPD machine as she investigates the death of a half-brother she didn’t know she had.

This 400-pager is tightly plotted, irresistible reading, with a labyrinthine story that should keep you guessing. There’s a high body count, and a quite bleak view of the justice system in Southern California.

I hadn’t read any Frost before, and there’s clearly at least one Delillo story before this one (Run the Risk). Before turning to thrillers, Frost has written scripts for Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, and Andromeda, among others. This is not surprising, as his more famous brother is Mark Frost. It says on the book’s blurb that he wrote for The X Files, too, but this credit isn’t on his IMDB entry.

This is good stuff, and I’d certainly pick up another one. A little bit despairing, perhaps, and with a title that doesn’t really mean anything or have much to do with the story, but you don’t read thrillers for the laughs.

Alien Influences by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This 1994 novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of the recent Retrieval Artist series, came into my hands via the Oxfam shop. Though not part of the Retrieval Artist sequence, it does concern itself with jurisprudence in a situation complicated by alien cultures, so it has a similar theme, and could be seen as an early attempt to tackle the same subject.

The subject is relevant to the world we live in, in which cheap international travel and foreign policy frequently place individuals at the mercy (or lack thereof) of “alien” legal systems. In the case of Alien Influences, it’s the human legal system that finds itself being undermined by the so-called alien influences. There’s also a link to contemporary concerns about cultural relativism: when is it right for “westerners” to cry foul against “barbaric” practices considered “normal” by other cultures?

A group of neglected children on a troubled colony planet start to copy rituals they’ve seen the local indigenous life-forms (called Dancers) doing. Unfortunately, these rituals involve mutilations which (in the case of the Dancers) help adolescents become adults. When practised by humans, however, the result is simply death. A xenopsychologist is called in to investigate by the corrupt local authorities, who have a hidden agenda. The resulting mess takes decades to untangle.

The scope of this book is enormous, tackling as it does such huge subjects. The problem is that it feels too disjointed, as if cobbled together from several shorter works. The characters don’t get a chance to develop, you don’t know who to care about, and the central mystery never really becomes compelling enough to be truly gripping. The edition I was reading (different cover art to that shown above) was also quite poor, with a lot of typos, which kind of spoils the enjoyment.

It was an interesting enough premise, but ultimately there are too many villains and inadequate heroes (perhaps too much like real life). When the book reaches its climax, I felt cheated because the author inserted an elision, a 3-year jump, and then winds it down with a final chapter. I wanted to see some of the venal and self-serving humans get theirs; I wanted to learn more about some of the aliens featured. This certainly wouldn’t put me off reading more Rusch novels, but I still haven’t read anything by her that’s anywhere near as good as her novella “Diving into the Wreck”.

Eclipse One: edited by Jonathan Strahan

Most of the short story collections I buy are reprints, meaning that they’ve been through at least two layers of editorial control. First in the publication that originally printed them (Asimov’s Magazine, or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction etc.), and then by the editor of the collection (usually Gardner Dozois, whose taste nicely coincides with my own).

With Eclipse One, the first of a proposed new series from Nightshade Books, Jonathan Strahan is trying to do something different. This is not one of the many annual “best of” anthologies, but a collection of new fiction in the vein of the old Universe collections edited by Terry Carr.

When I read this in Strahan’s Introduction, I sat up and paid attention, because I have fond memories of Terry Carr’s annual Best Science Fiction of the Year collections, which all had the familiar Gollancz yellow cover and were a staple of my library borrowing in my teens and twenties. I don’t recall reading many of the Universe collections, however, which were a different beast entirely. A brand new collection of stories especially commissioned is a much riskier prospect than the quality assurance offered by a Best Of collection.

So what do we get here? Fifteen stories, some familiar names, 260-odd pages, and a fair mixture of fantasy and SF. Rather than the doorstop-style 300,000-word volumes put out by Dozois each year, this feels more like an extra thick edition of a quarterly magazine. Conspicuous by its absence is the New Space Opera or anything resembling Hard Science. Instead you get the quirky, the odd, the mysterious, and the purely fantastical. It’s a nice mixture, actually, recalling the Gollancz collections of the 70s and 80s. The opener is typical: “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse” by Andy Duncan is just the type of offbeat story Terry Carr might have chosen, and it’s neither fish nor fowl, really. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s supposed to be SF or fantasy, or both, or neither. It’s just a slice of life, slightly mystical, personal, and poignant.

The well known names here include Garth Nix, Gwyneth Jones, and Bruce Sterling. Given the vast quantity of short SF I read, I wasn’t all that familiar with the writers here, partly because they come from a fantasy background. I was pleased to see the Gwyneth Jones story (because I particularly enjoyed her entry in the latest Dozois collection), and I’ve discovered quite a few writers I’ll seek out for further reading. The short length isn’t an issue, either, because the stories within are so different from each other that you find yourself reading at a more ruminative pace.

My one complaint is that the cover price ($14.95 or £7.35) is a bit steep, though I guess the price is worth paying to support new writing. There are a number of cheaper options available in the Used section on Amazon. Eclipse Two is due October 2008, according to the publisher’s web site.

Certainly worth seeking out if you have a jones for new SF beyond the Best Of annuals.

The Spirit Stone by Katharine Kerr

As previously mentioned on this blog, far from finishing at Volume 12, Katharine Kerr’s epic fantasy series continues here with Vol 13, the Spirit Stone, and the forthcoming Volume 14, The Shadow Isle, which is to be published in May.

This upsets the symmetry of the series somewhat. The Spirit Stone is billed as Volume 5 of The Dragon Mage, whereas you could see it as Volume 1 of the something else.

I always find it slightly confusing when it’s been a while since I read one, because the story really picks up more or less where it left off, so you have to remind yourself of the various characters, their incarnations, and relationships. A Table of Incarnations is provided at the back of the book, though I like to have a map, too. The earlier series had useful maps, but I think things have spread so far and wide now that you would need a small atlas at the beginning of the books. I don’t think the economics of publishing allow for this.

Anyway, it’s more or less standard Kerr fair. The Alshandra cult is still going strong, though there are beginning to be doubts in the minds of some adherents. The Horsekin are building a fortress in Westfolk territory, and an alliance of humans, elves, and dwarves band together to do battle. Personally, I find the battle sequences and territory wars the least interesting aspect of this. The real interest lies in the various mysteries: what is the mysterious black crystal pyramid, and whose is the spirit who is trapped inside? Why won’t the wound of Rori the dragon ever heal? And who are the mysterious brother and sister who emerge part-way through this story, who are neither human, nor elf, nor horsekin? (A glance at the cover art for The Shadow Isle gives the clue that they may become more prominent in the next volume).

Nevyn and Jill are reborn as Neb and Branna, and their particular spiral of fate seems to have settled, though there is unfinished business with several other characters.

An enjoyable entry, though I have the same complaint to make as I made with the last one: no chapters, which means that it’s hard to find an opportune moment to put it down and do something else. Like sleep.