Truth of the matter

Published on Friday 18 April 2008 15:17

HE WAS UP IN TONY BLAIR'S OLD constituency of Sedgefield for the by-election, doing the old routine: looking for the out-of-the-ordinary, the revealing quote, the telling phrase. He wandered up to the Blairs' old house, the one they'd bought from the Trimdon Colliery doctor when Tony became the constituency MP in 1984. There was something strange about it, and it wasn't that it appeared to have no doors and you couldn't work out which way it faced.

He'd been to a few murderers' houses, and this is what they felt like. The leylandii hiding their own secrets like they had at Fred West's place in Gloucester. The police blocking off the cul de sac, like they had on the Yorkshire Ripper's old house in Bradford. That sense of a place apart from the rest of the houses around it, aloof from the currents of ordinary life in the surrounding pitmen's terraces.

Gordon Burn has written books about both those serial killers, and woven Myra Hindley into his Whitbread award-winning novel of 1991, Alma Cogan, so he knows all about how the media circus swirls round unlikely places and moves off again, leaving an odd quietness in its wake. And it's that very particular and peculiar absence he was trying to nail down as he toured round Trimdon Colliery, notebook in hand, for his new book, Born Yesterday. For this was where George Bush arrived by helicopter for a Sunday pint with his British best buddy; this was where Tony Blair stopped on his way to church and told the television cameras, with a slight catch in his throat, that a woman who'd died hours before in a Paris underpass had been the people's princess.

Diana, Dubya: if even a run-down Co Durham village has that kind of claim on the world's retinas, so, in a media-saturated age, has almost everywhere else. And because news stories feed increasingly into our own – as, last summer, they did with the Madeleine McCann case, the attempted bombings in Glasgow and London, and the handover of power from Blair to Brown – what we need is a guide who will attentively follow in their tracks, drawing out links, showing what we are missing in the wider picture.

That's where Burn comes in. There were times, he tells me when we meet in London, when he wasn't sure where those stories would lead, when he despaired of ever being able to pull them all together against a publisher's deadline set deliberately tight so that all the stories – Smeato, the floods in England, Damian Hirst's diamond skull – would still be fresh in readers' minds. Times when he just made lists of what he'd bought and ate because he couldn't think of what else to do. For all his doubts, though, Born Yesterday breaks new ground in reportage: for future historians of the Noughties it will become an indispensable mirror to a panicky, celebrity-obsessed age.

Confusingly for some (and certainly for its reviewers on Newsnight Review) Born Yesterday is subtitled "The News as a Novel". It's not a novel in any conventional sense, I think, more a kind of sophisticated meditation on news. No, Burn insists, there are fictional elements to it, and that vivified the writing process for him: although he had indeed seen Kate Middleton shopping in his local supermarket, a scene in which he had paparazzi materialising out of various hiding places in the street and snapping away at Prince William's Official Girlfriend as she made her way through a sudden downpour was purely imagined.

Burn's definition of imagination, however, is one that is perfectly possible to square with the world of facts. "There's a great quote from John Berger that I always had in my brain while I was working on this. He said something like imagination is not – as most people think – the ability to invent, but the ability to disclose what is already there."

What's new about Burn's book isn't the occasional blurring of the line between reality and imagination, but the uncovering of links between different news stories. Take the McCanns: it was at Praia da Luz, he points out, that Paul McCartney asked Linda to marry him; it was near the McCanns' home in Leicester that DNA was first brought into forensic use. More coincidences abound. Madeleine's Cuddle Cat is almost exactly the same, he notes, as the image on the cover of Fullalove, his (wonderfully accurate) novel about tabloid journalism; the same kind of tabloid journalists follow Kate McCann, to whom Heather Mills compares herself in the GMTV studio, where she bumps into Gordon Brown, who has a defective eye, just like Robert Murat, the Portuguese police's first official suspect in the case. And so, in a La Ronde of rolling news and reportage, on.

"I don't think this sort of thing has been done before," he says. "Of course, Truman Capote started off the 'non-fiction novel' more than four decades ago with In Cold Blood, using the poetic truths and resonances that you get from fiction on a real-life murder case. But these days, news moves faster and becomes instantly fictionalised, and the nugget of the actual event soon gets lost in the spin, the hype, e-mails, blogging and so on. What I wanted to do was to fictionalise the news stories explicitly. As soon as the event happened, I was going to go to the centre of the story and anyone I met there was going to become like characters in a novel."

Going to the centre of last summer's news stories took him to, among many other places, Tony Blair's two-way-facing house, Glasgow Airport, the Royal Alexandria Hospital in Paisley, the Erskine Hospital and Gordon Brown's house in North Queensferry. In each place, the aim was to get beneath the buzz of the news story, to "unpeel" the event from its surroundings, to brush aside the clichs of that first media blitz, to think about what actually happened and link it to other stories. Sometimes, he seems to be suggesting, only in the aftermath of a news story, when the journalists have cleared off, can you see the things they might have missed.

Take, for example, the quiet way in which he opens the story, talking to a professional dog-walker in the London park near his home, or the Lithuanian girl in the tea-kiosk there. He sees Lady Thatcher; she stoops to pet the dogs while her minders get a cup of tea in the kiosk, where Irina might have told them about working at a mudbath rock concert the week before. By degrees, the focus widens. One of the dogwalkers was in an episode of How Clean Is Your House?; at the tea kiosk a Ukrainian girl talks about the price of organic bacon or moans about Glastonbury's drugged-up fans. One link at a time, the portrait of the Iron Pensioner slips away into one of a very different Britain: reality TV, noise, eastern European workers, floods and organic food.

So much reportage lacks the intelligence and the subtlety of what Burn serves up here. But he's had a long apprenticeship in looking behind journalism's clichs of good and evil, and knows how seldom stereotypes square with reality. In Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, his story of the Yorkshire Ripper, he got to know Peter Sutcliffe's family so well "that they stopped being the bogeymen they'd become because of him". Fred West, written off by the media as a dullard, "turned out, when you listened to the police tapes of their questioning, to be extremely bright".

In Born Yesterday, Burn smashes not just clichs of language but of form. The links he draws from last summer's news stories are as light and unpredictable as a butterfly's flight, yet often end up with a thudding fact that makes you sit up straight. Yes, you might think, you know all about England's floods last summer. Really? Did you ever think about what it must be like to have other people's excrement floating around your kitchen? Or did you hear "flood experts" on daytime TV warning that people should put something heavy on top of manhole covers to prevent them ever being sucked down into the sewers? Me neither.

When he was writing the book, Burn says, he often wondered whether he was on the right course: there was no time for anyone else to read it, or for wholescale rewrites. It was a risk. Yet at the same time, it wasn't. Because seeing links, seeing the wider picture, seizing on a small image and making it a defining one is something he has been doing in all of his books. Coldly but clearly displaying the facts is where his imagination lies.

He had a sense that he'd stumbled on to something while writing Alma Cogan, his first novel. "I had the same sense of excitement when I was working on this – that I was sitting on a secret that I think is good."

He's right. It is. Read it.

Gordon Burn on...

Linking stories: I hate even to compare myself to Naipaul, but this is what he does brilliantly – he sees things into existence just by being still and calm, looking and looking until he starts to see links that no-one else would have made.

Writing from the centre of a story: "Sometimes the hair at the back of your neck goes up, you get a gut feeling, you see something which hasn't been written about in this kind of often slightly oblique, left-field way."

Fantasy: "I can't read fantasy fiction, I'm asleep in four minutes. Fiction has to have its roots in the real thing or I don't believe it. If you can't believe it, what's the point in writing it?"

&#149 Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn is published by Faber, priced 7.99.