Review of Born Yesterday by Gordon Burn (Sydney Morning Herald, 02/08/08)

Gordon Burn, Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel
Faber; $39.95; 215pp

To date, at least two reviewers of Born Yesterday have said that its author, Gordon Burn, has taken literally Ezra Pound’s dictum that ‘literature is news that stays news’. In fact, the book does nothing of the kind. Rather, it is deliberately ephemeral; would seem, indeed, to refer the reader to the novel’s sensationalist origins. (‘Novel’: from the French for new: nouvelle.) Written and published to a gruellingly tight schedule, it takes events still fresh in the memory and weaves them into a patchwork narrative of coincidences and dark connections. ‘LIVE’ shrieks the little red clock-cum-logo in the bottom left-hand corner of the front cover, which depicts a pixellated Tony Blair. Well no, not live exactly (or at all). But unquestionably – strikingly – au courant.

Set in the UK in 2007, the novel is crammed with references to the key events of that troubled year, in particular the foiled terrorist attacks on Glasgow Airport and the Tiger Tiger night club and the disappearance of Madeline McCann from Praia da Luz in Portugal. A year of almost biblical floods, 2007 also saw the resignation of Tony Blair and his replacement by the Chancellor Gordon Brown. Burn follows all of these stories in detail – indeed, in often morbid detail: the Madeline story is particularly harrowing, as are the stories of flood-related deaths.

Blair’s resignation and the resulting by-election also allow Burn to introduce one of his defining themes: the way in which the television media has come to saturate reality. Blair’s years in power were notable for their slickness, a slickness of which the public had, by 2007, grown cynically weary. In contrast, Brown was a breath of stale air: an economy wonk in a rumpled suit. However, there was a PR problem: Brown was authentic, but he was also boring, so the authenticity had to be spun. ‘The task was to rebrand him as a politician … To re-enchant the commodity by tapping into the same hankering for a grainy tangibility to the artefact that had seen the fetishisation of other antiquated analogue formats like vinyl and tape cassettes.’

The novel has no central narrative but is rather a collection of narratives, or ‘stories’ in the journalistic sense, the often tortuous links between which add up to a sort of satire on perception – on the collective attention deficit disorder engendered by rolling news and the internet. The motif of the defective eye (the British Prime Minister is blind in one eye; Madeline McCann has a pigmentary blemish) seems to underline this theme, while the various uninhabited houses that are sprinkled throughout the narrative appear to metaphorically figure the absence of any strong central character. To the extent that there is one, it is Burn himself – a self-reflexiveness that further undermines the book’s generic designation. Most of the time, Born Yesterday doesn’t read like a novel at all but a particularly brilliant piece of New Journalism.

That the novel is not that ‘novelistic’ should not, however, put readers off. Nor is Ulysses or At Swim Two Birds, and we wouldn’t want to be without them. What matters is that it is superbly written, often moving and weirdly gripping. Moreover, it raises fascinating questions – about the form and about the world. Is literature news that stays news? Or is the news a novel that stays novel? Both, perhaps. Or a bit of neither.