Miners condemned to stay on the surface

GB84

David Peace

Faber & Faber, 12.99

THERE is no doubt that the miners’ strike - a shameful though potentially highly instructive period in our history - should be remembered as an example of the damage that a callous and corrupt government can do to a people for whom it feels nothing but indifference. Whether or not its documentation should take the form of a novel is another question.

"2004 is the 20th anniversary of the miners’ strike and GB84 is sure to be a focal point for media coverage and discussion," the publicity material for this book proclaims. The timing of its publication invites cynical criticism and doubts as to the purity of the publisher’s, or even the author’s, motives.

So often the vital, complex reality of recent history becomes, in the course of "media coverage and discussion", the merest entertainment; a procession of recognisable types and apparent faits accomplis, presented in an easily consumed form with all the trappings of extensive research and passionate engagement that is so widely respected, and yet, when it comes down to it, is so utterly irrelevant to the quality of the work under consideration.

As it happens, David Peace has taken the trouble to make GB84 difficult to consume. A confusing melange of alternating and sometimes conflicting narratives, the book seems appropriately experimental and takes on the question of historical accuracy as fully as one might expect from a work of contemporary fiction. The approach might even be described as ‘postmodern’ if one were in the mood and wanted to gloss over the fact that this book is really not that interesting.

Peace has been compared to James Ellroy; and, like Ellroy’s more recent work, there is a sense of surface, of heartlessness to GB84 that is as fashionable as it is disappointing. Reading it, I found myself harking back to some bygone age when books did something other than hurtle like an express train through the mind, making no other impression than a loud but essentially characterless roar. Setting it down I felt undernourished, as if I’d ordered a three-course meal and been served a bag of crisps.

This is not to say that GB84 is a bad book for its time and place. On the contrary, it is as good an example of contemporary British fiction - competent, glittering, pointless - as could be found today (barring a couple of painfully neglected exceptions). Like so much else that we consume, GB84 is both visceral and undemanding, well-read and uninformed.

If the stereotypes this book parades before us were women or Asians, rather than working-class men, there would be a huge though entirely stage-managed public outcry. It is painfully and self-consciously experimental yet oddly old-fashioned, trendy and dull, a neither-here-nor-there of a work that will, no doubt, be "the mainstream literary breakthrough of the season".

Good luck to it, I say. Its writer has brought patient research and obvious hard work to the process. The fact that it shows should neither hinder its progress through the supplements nor limit its appeal as a subject for serious debate on the late-night art shows.

John Burnside’s latest novel is Living Nowhere