Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel
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Product Description
Book Description
One of Britain's most fearless writers takes on real news stories in the most ambitious and innovative novel of the year.
Product Description
Summer 2007 was an extraordinarily rich time for news. Floods. Foot and mouth. The disappearances of Tony Blair and Madeleine MacCann. The arrival of Gordon Brown. Terror attacks in Glasgow.
And Gordon Burn, artist, journalist and true-crime author, has taken the events from this bleak summer and turned them into a novel about the way news is made, and the way the media creates and manipulates the stories we see before us.
This is a daring and thrilling novel from one of the most astute observers of celebrity and tragedy. It is sure to make the headlines itself for the way it is written and for the controversial subjects he tackles. In Born Yesterday Gordon Burn creates a whole new way of writing a novel, and makes us think again about the stories we are fed by the media around us.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Completed in February 2008, the book is a collage of events and coincidences culled from the UK news pages of summer 2007, in particular the abduction of Madeleine McCann and the transfer of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown. Gordon Burn's previous novels spun a web of detail about the British landscape and its fallen celebrities (from showbiz and crime) that weaved a rich portrait of Britain in the present and recent past. He takes this approach a stage further here, looking at the near present tense of the writing. He crams in detail from media reported news from 2007; there is a richness of detail but the casualty is the crafted complex prose that painted tangible characters and was so central to his previous fictional works. The writing here has none of the depth of his earlier novels (probably due to the speed with which he completed the book). There is really no character painting here (no fictional characters as such) and this is the book's loss. To compensate Burn brings together some powerful ideas around celebrity, glamour, death, and life as a media icon, harking back to 'Alma Cogan'. 'Born Yesterday' is more a cultural critique than a novel, but an engaging read anyway. I personally hope to see Gordon Burn return to his more fictionalised take on the shifting social landscape of Britain that serves as such good starting point for his observational writing.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Gordon Burn's final book Born Yesterday (he died in July 2009), is about as good a tribute to its author 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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a very exciting and well written novel. The basic idea is that the news of the Summer of 2007 has been re-told, woven into a story. So, you have the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow, the Prime Minister leaving Downing Street under a cloud and girl who goes missing in Portugal... I think Gordon Burn is one of my favourite authors because what could just be musings and real life reality soaps could meander into nothing. Yet, Burns produces a thought provoking novel and it is a disturbing and interesting read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
"Literature is news that stays news"
I've given this book three stars because although well-written and perceptive, with some brilliant passages, I'm not sure that it works as a novel (and it is this novelistic aspect... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Eleanor
news as a unsatisfying novel
This is intended to be anovel based on the events and figures in the news in 2007, featuring Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the McCann's, with extra roles for Kate Middleton and John... Read more
Published on 13 Feb 2010 by C. Cowan
BRILLIANTLY IMPORTANT OR JUST A CHEAP SHOT?
I gave this book 3 stars because I am basically undecided. The concept behind the book is certainly thought-provoking i.e. Read more
Published on 4 Jun 2008 by Eric Wilton
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
In 'Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel' Gordon Burn guides us through the big British news events of 2007, focusing particularly on the handover of power from Tony Blair to Gordon... Read more
Published on 27 April 2008 by Peter Hurst
The news as a novel
I feel compelled to tell everyone about this book. Gordon Burn has taken the top news stories of 2007 and turned them into a novel. Read more
Published on 11 April 2008 by Christopher Ross
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