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.

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

Marketed by good old Gollancz as one of a special selection of “SF Masterworks”, warning bells should have been ringing for me when one of the blurbs/review quotes suggested that this particular SF novel shaded over into the realm of literary fiction. Oo er. Personally, literary fiction is my least favourite genre, and I find it all terribly tedious.

The Child Garden could be described as part of the recent trend in exploring the post-human condition. In this case, humans have been (a) genetically engineered to photosynthesise at least part of their nutrition; and (b) left (by various ironic medical advances) with a terribly short lifespan and hardly any childhood. Most people are dead at 35 and therefore achieve adulthood at around 8 years of age. Knowledge is programmed into people by viruses, and teenagers are (and act as if they are) middle aged.

So far so standard. Larry Niven was writing about knowledge being programmed into people by strands of RNA in the 70s (see his early novel A World out of Time or the short story “Rammer”), and many of the other ideas were as familiar.

The literary part of this was the way it was written. All the ideas are over-laboured, and the prose is dense and repetitive, eminently skipable. It aspires to be Dickensian in the manner of The Light Ages, but it ends up emulating Dickens only in as much as it is a bit dull.

This was a real disappointment, because I was quite prepared to trust that Gollancz had genuinely selected some corkers in its SF Masterworks series. But looking at the list, that purveyor of wank Philip K. Dick is over-represented, and I’m afraid that Ryman’s Child Garden is more of the same. Incidentally, the blurb on the cover mentions a London surrounded by rice paddies, as if this was some kind of prescient global warming tome. I honestly have no idea where the blurb writers got the bit about rice paddies from. Maybe a bit I skipped.

(Gollancz’s list does have some good titles, but I do wish they’d revisit their classic series of annual “Best of the Year” collections, edited by Terry Carr.)

Alma Cogan by Gordon Burn

Review by Rashbre

For somewhat arcane reasons I was reminded recently of a story in which a man takes the persona of a female singer. The writer of the book is Gordon Burn and it is about Alma Cogan, a popular British singer from the 1950s.

Burn moves the persona of Alma forward into a later time and then intertwines a story linked with mystery and crime of the 1980s.

Burn is a clever writer and there are some amusing asides in a book which ultimately has a strong and macabre backdrop. On perfume “You want a man to like it, go after the food groups” was Alma’s mother’s advice on a cantelope and orange scent.

I originally read this book some time ago and remember some of the phrases and scenes, but then blasted through it again now for a second time. I found a haunting quality about the descriptions of the early popular music world and some crossover with clubland London books like “The long firm” and some parts of Martin Amis’s work.

Alma also showed her 50s innocence towards ‘Jazz Woodbines’ new kinds of tea (made with benzedrine) and wholesome advice which would nowadays fit well on daytime television or maybe into a new age tent “Never collect inanimate objects, or in the end they will possess you and you will lose your freedom”.

But Burn’s Alma is past her singing best in the 1980s (in real life she died in 1966) and her visits to old haunts and to the places of her catalogued past are creepy, alongside references to (for example) a Marc Bolan glitzy suit and to varied other celebrity remnants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Burn speaks through Alma’s voice and there is much around faded celebrity as well as the tightening of the story which transitions in the second part of the book into a linkage with moors murderer Myra Hindley.

I found the book in the back of a shelf with other books piled in front of it. That I sought it out for a re-read and that I still find it intriguing is, for me a good sign.

A recent blogging encounter reminded me of this story of a female pop icon told very effectively via a man’s writing.

Summer reading

Including: Douglas Coupland: All Families are Psychotic, Eleanor Rigby; Joshilyn Jackson: Gods in Alabama

summer books
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

As (sort of) usual, I badly underestimated my summer reading requirements. I figured, what with having my guitar for company, I’d not have the endless empty hours to fill that I usually have. But I did. This, in spite of an hour or so guitar practice every day, and in spite of scanning and photoshopping 150 or so old photographs from my wife’s family’s albums and taking 800 or so other photographs on various family outings.

Time: and lots of it, which is what having a holiday is really all about. It helps that, staying at the in-laws, I cooked just one meal (a stir fry, to demonstrate wok cooking) in the two weeks and really didn’t have to do any of those household chores, so I really did have lots and lots of time available.

So my small pile of books, consisting of the latest Michael Connelly (The Closers) and the latest PJ Tracy (Dead Run), a single issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and (a late addition, donated by Andrew) Tragically I was an Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook; my small pile was inadequate. The two thrillers disappeared within three days (see separate review), and I ploughed through the Peter Cook for the remainder of the week, not really enjoying it, because it’s more the sort of book you dip into on the loo or something. I’d taken Swallows and Amazons with me to read to the kids, so I privately fast-forwarded through that, too. I made the Asimov’s last until the second Sunday evening by forcing myself to put it down and do something else at the end of each story (and I cursed the fact that I’d left two further unread issues at home, in spite of thinking vaguely for months that I would take them on holiday with me and do them justice).

Monday of the second week, we went on a trip to Strasbourg, and I had it in my mind that, in such an international city, a University town to boot, I’d find a bookshop with some fiction étrangers. And so it proved. Remarkably, there was a damn good selection, and I picked 4 crackers to see me through the rest of the week: two by Douglas Coupland, All Families Are Psychotic, and Eleanor Rigby. Ones I hadn’t read, though I always think I probably have, since all his books are so similar. Another thriller: California Girl by Jefferson Parker; and gods in Alabama by first-time novelist Joshilyn Jackson. Paid through the nose for them, natch, but not a Euro was wasted.

Proving what? That you can judge a book by its cover, I suppose. The Jackson cover looked a little bit too much like so-called “Women’s Fiction,” but the blurb on the back was more in the line of genre – it was a literary type of thriller: there’s a body involved, but the narrative is chopped up and told half backwards and half forwards, like, y’know, art.

But it was still a cracking read, and a real page-turner. Not enough pages, unfortunately, and I devoured it completely in a single day. It’s the story of a girl who promises God that she’ll stop fornicating and lying, and never return to Alabama, if He’ll just somehow spirit away the body of a High School quarterback she happens to have clouted with a heavy Tequila bottle on the top of a make-out hill when she was 15. Twelve years later, someone turns up looking for the missing quarterback, and everything starts to unravel.

Was four additional books enough? Just about. I saved Eleanor Rigby for the last day, the airport hours, and it was just enough: two weeks, 8 books, and an issue of Asimov’s (a skimpy paperback collection of short stories). Given that I had to pace myself a bit, I’d estimate 10 books, or 8 and a couple extra Asimov’s is really enough. Should make a note of that somewhere.

As for the Coupland. I always enjoy him, because he writes in the way I’d write, in my dreams, and he’s a keen observer of the modern condition who creates pleasurable sentences that speak directly to me. Like this one:

‘Life is boring. People are vengeful. Good things always end. We do so many things and we don’t know why, and if we do find out why, it’s decades later and knowing why doesn’t matter any more.’