Gordon Burn died two weeks ago, after a writing career in which he developed a reputation for covering difficult subjects with a radical pen. Burn sliced through the myths about celebrity and fame, whether dealing with notorious criminals (Fred and Rosemary West, Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe), or well known figures in the entertainment and sporting worlds (George Best, Alma Cogan).
Despite his subject matter, Gordon Burn was never prurient or out to shock, but wanted to get behind the person to the reasons for their actions and the meaning of what they did. He came to his topics dispassionately but shone a torch into murky corners to show the complicit systems in media and politics that supported the lives of outcasts and celebrities alike.
Burn was not a run of the mill author. His friend the artist Damien Hurst wrote in an article in the Guardian, “I really do think he was the greatest writer, the best writer of our generation on art. It was because he was a novelist that he was so good: he brought something else to the table. There is so much bullshit and art-speak in the art world, it drives me nuts. Gordon cut through all of that”.
His last book, Born Yesterday is about as good a tribute to Gordon Burn as you could get. It is a strange book, for at first glance it does not appear to be fiction at all, more like a rolling news review of 2007. Burn covers many of the major news events of the year, including the abduction of Madeleine McCann, terror attacks at Glasgow airport, Gordon Brown’s succession from Tony Blair, the catastrophic flooding that affected great areas of the country. All these stories are interleaved throughout the book, but as you read them you realise that this is not journalism at all.
After the first couple of chapters, you realise that Burn is creating something new by looking at the connections between all the stories and the way they all interact with each other. Before long, the reader gets drawn into the conflation of real-life news events and sees that there really is a bigger picture, that in fact much of this so called “news” only really exists because of and through the media. Age-old stories are being told and re-created, and new myths are called into being but how much to they rely on “facts” and how much does the story exist because of itself.
Burn discovers linking themes in the news (the way the media created a picture of Kate McCann as a cold, unfeeling woman, somehow devoid of normal emotions, almost an “android”. The focus on eyes in a sort of mythical way (Gordon Brown’s loss of an eye, Madeleine McCann unusual “flaw” in her iris), the homo-erotic side of Blair’s government. In reviewing Alastair Campbell’s “Diaries”, John Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books that the diaries were “full of dark-haired men shouting at each other . . . bursting into tears, having make-up heart-to-hearts, saying bitchy things behind each other’s backs”. . . “Its not a gay thing exactly, but its not the opposite of a gay thing”.
By the end of the book, I was reminded (as I need to be reminded again and again) that the media creates the news. Or rather it takes a news item and turns it into a story, just as much a work of fiction as any novel. The bones of this book are the hard facts of “what really happened” but it is a work of fiction because it assembles a larger myth from the many smaller myths that were created on television and in the press.
The Guardian reports in his obituary the Burn said that, “the idea was to find a story, and the moment the news explosion happened to go there and write about it, turn it into a novel in the way that happens all the time through rolling news, newspapers, blogging”. The novel was written in just one month, in an attempt to publish it while the news was still fresh in people’s mind. The Guardian reports that Burn’s editor at Faber, Lee Brackstone said that, “Born Yesterday was “an experiment as brave as anything attempted by Pound, BS Johnson, or Foster Wallace”.
Born Yesterday is certainly a unique creation, crossing the border between fact and fiction and showing the impossibility of being certain where the boundary is. It will be of interest to anyone who follows current affairs with more than a passing glance and will definitely serve as a reminder that nothing is quite what it seems.
