Born Yesterday

by Gordon Burn

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.

Genres: Fiction, 21st Century

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2008

About the author

Gordon Burn was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction.

Burn's novels deal with issues of modern fame and faded celebrity, as well as life through a media lens. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in the 1960s, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels Fullalove and The North of England Home Service appeared in 1995 and 2003 respectively. His non-fiction deals primarily with sport and true crime. His first book Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper' and his 1998 book Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with one of Britain's most notorious serial killers.

Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books are Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), which deals with the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best and the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways."

He also wrote a book with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992-2001. He contributed to The Guardian regularly, usually writing about contemporary art.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Odd asf...

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written but meandering journal of major events in the UK news of 2007, how it can be described as a "novel" I do not know. I learned a few things about the McCann family, I suppose, and of Gordon Brown. Other than that it was not so different from those Review Of The Year pieces the quality (ha ha) newspapers (ha ha ha) used to put out around Christmas time each year. (I imagine they still do, I read one newspaper in the last two years but that's one more than in the previous several. Did I miss anything? Emphatically not.)

[Babs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good. Looks at notions of erasure, absence, celebrity, death. Although following in the footsteps of Mailer, Capote, the already long-established form of New Journalism and also of several of his own earlier books, to have written this novel formed of current news stories was an original and inspired feat, not to mention, given that it was written in only six weeks, a technical one as well.

[Brian Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big fan of Gordon Burn and, especially his non-fiction work, is very arresting in its power. It reeks of whispered confidences, colloquialisms and personable stylings.

Born Yesterday was obviously written to an incredibly tight schedule and Burn maintains a good grip on his writing despite the rush to press.

I get the notion being pushed here, that news is a novel, that the angle and spin is everything. However, I fell that Burn could have pushed this angle a bit harder.

Maybe that is an unfair criticism given that this book is ten years old and the news has become more opinionated and working to its own agenda that it has ever been. Burn has, perhaps, only been reflecting the news as it was at the time.

Anway, I read this book quite happily but it did not completely enthrall me, the stories it covers jump around a little bit, this books feels a little stream-of-conscious type of writing. Interesting enough but doesn't ever quite get round to making the point promised in the blurb.

Not the strongest book in his canon (that place is reserved for the books covering Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rose West) but this is still worth reading.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Born Yesterday explores the uneasy territory between crime, celebrity, politics and news; these are themes that Gordon Burn has shown a fascination with in previous books, both fiction and factual, but in this book they come together in a deeply unsettling way. Set, and written in 2007-8, at a particularly fevered time in the public life of the U.K., it's a disturbing precognition of the life we live now, ten years on.

[Antonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was quite confusing to follow - the chapters and people talked about didn't really link together as I expected them to.

However I did find out some interesting facts around events that happened in 2007 that I didn't know already!

Strange concept for a book, but nevertheless entertaining.

[Cindy Roux · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my kind of book

[Catherine Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A year of news turned into a novel. A punchy ride through a turbulent year, made more memorable if you’re old enough to have lived through this time.

[Loretta Omoruanzoje · Rating 3 out of 5]

Learned some interesting facts but all in all found it confusing

[Gary Twynam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this when it first came out. I am a fan of Gordon Burn's writing, though if I'm honest the non fiction more than the fiction. However, I struggled with it, the items of news from 2007 he was weaving together felt too recent.

I've just picked it up again (2014), and right now seems a great time to read it. 2007 turned out to be a big news year - not least the incipient banking crisis - and many of the themes are still playing out. This may be lucky for the book, or it may only be a transient feeling, but the book really resonated for me at this distance. True, 2007 was also a momentous year for me personally (moving from London to Shropshire and then flooding and losing pretty much all our possessions) so I may be biased, and may have connected with the book on a more personal level than many.

Still think this is a very good time to read it...

[Lane Ashfeldt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the summer of 2007, written at speed and published the following year, 'Born Yesterday' weaves a narrative of sorts from images which at the time had not long vanished from the British news.

These are:
- the disappearances that summer of Tony Blair and Madeleine McCann
- Gordon Brown’s induction as Prime Minister, against the backdrop of the floods
- a slightly less public image of Thatcher being walked in the park by her minders

Not what you might normally think of as a novel, then.

However, Gordon Burn’s meditations on absence and celebrity, on leadership and loss, make weirdly compulsive reading.

[Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Despite how high profile the stories recounted in Born Yesterday are, they still make for compelling reading in the way, Burn as prose stylist, evokes the misery of somehow being involved. By giving an account of exactly what was going on in 2007, it must surely be the definitive state-of-the-nation novel."

Read my full review here.

[Kaylol · Rating 1 out of 5]

It might be a good book but I just could force myself to read it all. After the first couple of pages I was extremely bored by the descriptions, my mind kept drifting off since there seemed to be nothing in what I was reading that engaged it. Definitely not the book for me.