GB84: The classic novel about the miners' strike - Softcover

Peace, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571314872 ISBN 13: 9780571314874

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2014

Synopsis

Stylish, riveting and appalling, GB84 is a shocking fictional documentation of the violence, sleaze and fraudulence that characterised Thatcher's Britain.

Great Britain. 1984. The miners' strike. It is the closest Britain has come to civil war in fifty years, setting the government against the people.

In his trademark visceral prose, Peace describes the insidious workings of the boardroom negotiations and the increasingly anarchic coalfield battles; the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of the NUM; and the corruption, intrigue and dirty tricks which run through the whole like a fault in a seam of coal.

David Peace has written a novel extraordinary in its reach, and unflinching in its capacity to recreate the brutality and passion that changed the course of British history in the late twentieth century.

'A genuine British original.' Guardian

'Peace is a writer of such immense talent and power . . . If Northern noir is the crime fashion of the moment, Peace is its most brilliant designer.' The Times

About this title

Review:

GB84, David Peace's fifth novel, is a gripping, tautly plotted dramatisation of the miners' strike in which real events (Orgreave, the Brighton bomb) and real people (Arthur Scargill, Margaret Thatcher, Ian MacGregor) mingle imperceptibly with his creations. "This novel", he notes in the acknowledgements, "is a fiction, based on fact" and those who recall The Comic Strip Present's Hollywood skit Strike will be happy, to discover that Peace does not take liberties with the strike's trajectory. Key events are faithfully chronicled here but his 1984 is, arguably, as sinisterly dystopian as anything Orwell could have envisioned.

How, perhaps, could it not be? His novel plunges into the very heart of the darkest days of Thatcherism. Inhabiting, in prose, so gaunt in places it feels as though it could easily have been lifted from surveillance reports, a political epoch when fear about an imminent nuclear apocalypse led to "99 Red Balloons" topping the charts and Mrs Thatcher declared open season on the striking miners, branding them the enemy within.

The nefariousness of the government's overt and covert campaigns against the miners is tapped a la James Ellroy for their full dramatic effect. In Stephen "The Jew" Sweet, a strike-bashing arch-media manipulator and his driver-cum-henchmen Neil Fontaine with his neo-Nazi hirelings, Peace represents the insidious practices of a state hell bent on crushing the dispute. While his portrayal of a hubristic Scargill and an NUM executive, beset by incompetence, corruption, bureaucracy and petty rivalries, depicts a union management hopelessly outflanked by comparison. The ordinary miners (whose plights are voiced by Peace in a couple of running narratives in Yorkshire dialect) are left to face the grind of the strike. Their desperation and, not unjustified paranoia, neatly illustrated by one striker's belief that Band Aid has been contrived to wrestle donations from the miners' charitable fund. --Travis Elborough

Review:

On one level GB84 works as a historically precise, week-by-week account of the strike. But it is also a conspiracy thriller laced with apocalyptic poetry. Its power lies in it mixture of documentary realism and enigmatic fantasy, its exploration of the intimate betrayals that constitute an epic social tragedy. Source: Independant

David Peace's GB84 will serve as a record - it brings to life the reality of the miners' strike in all its grisly detail ... It's as flecked with blood, spittle and bile as the conflict itself, and will serve as a fitting testament to the real cost of Thatcher's iron will. Source: Arena

The novel's bite is matched by its swallow. ... The writing is clever, terse, incisive. The sentences short. This mammoth conspiracy tale is a thriller daubed with horror, a mirror signalling Britain's future ... GB84 is a commentary, a how-dunnit without revisionism, sentiment or nostalgia ... In the end his triumph signals tragedy. You read. You reel. You ponder. In the pondering lies the portent of the tale. Author: Tom Adair Source: Scotsman

The British James Ellroy, Peace has also moved from the crime genre to a broader, bloodier canvas, excavating the dank world of Eighties politics ... When the reader comes up for air at the apocalyptic end, it is with a sense of the futility, the waste and above all the ugliness (on all sides) of the strike that changed British politics forever. Highly recommended. Author: James Hundleby Source: Jack

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0571314872
• ISBN 13: 9780571314874
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480