What we lost last summer

It’s startling to read about extremely recent news events in a book presented as a novel. In Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn uses the McCanns, the floods, the foiled terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, Blair’s farewell and Brown’s hello as the meat of his narrative. Although this isn’t a conventional novel, in that the narrator appears to be Gordon Burn (addressing himself as ‘he’) and his ‘journey’ consists merely of reflecting on last summer’s major news stories and conducting the occasional interview, its approach to the news is nevertheless novelistic. It’s as if you’re reading a secret Sunday supplement which reports the news not as reality, but as components of a fictive world. The suggestion, of course, is that a fictive world is exactly what contemporary media presents, and we, as round-the-clock news consumers whether we like it or not, are co-opted by it.

This isn’t a new idea — it’s at least as old as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967): ‘Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,’ he wrote, with particular reference to the effect of mass media. But Born Yesterday is still a unique project, and one that is by turns unsettling, jarring, hilarious and profound. Its major weakness is inevitably that it feels rushed — if Burn had had an extra year to write it, so much more could have been done, but the crucial effect of immediacy would have been sacrificed.

Loss is the over-arching theme, or as Burn puts it, subtraction. In the summer of 2007, we lost Blair and Madeleine McCann, Brown lost his bounce, and thousands of people lost their homes to the floods. The narrator dwells on these events as if they are deeply personal, not just to him but to everyone.