Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Gordon Burn
Faber and Faber 1995
I really struggled with this Gordon Burn novel, just as I did with The North of England Home Service. Burn’s use of language is dazzling – exhausting even – but this wasn’t an easy read. The account of a middle-aged cynical tabloid hack is deeply depressing, as are the lives of the other characters he comes across – for example, a photographer who specialises in pictures of the murdered and the tortured. The tone is relentlessly bleak, showing a society without any non-material values, and thus without hope. It seems that the research Burns had to do for his earlier non-fiction works on the Yorkshire Ripper and the Wests coloured (grey) his view of the world as a whole. All this got me down, but what frustrated me, once again, was a story that I just couldn’t follow. By the end, perhaps because I had given up on the characters, I just couldn’t work out what was going on at all. Who was the woman who cleaned the memorials to murder victims? And the bloke who raced crabs and then set himself on fire? And the mother of the teenage baby killers who had sex with the aforementioned photographer? I had no idea. Although the language is impressive, and the bleak picture of tabloid journalism convincing, this book just wasn’t for me.
6th November 2009
Gordon Burn died earlier this year. A link to an obituary is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jul/22/gordon-burn
See also: Best and Edwards
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