GB84 - Softcover

Peace, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1612193935 ISBN 13: 9781612193939

Publisher: Melville House Pub, 2014

Synopsis

Never before published in the U.S., GB84 will be launched in 2014 alongside two other novels by David Peace: The Damned Utd and Red or Dead

In taut and gripping prose that often feels like the relentless text of a surveillance report, GB84 tells the story of the British coal miner's strike of 1984--including the actual bombings, riots and protests that brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Called by its author "fiction based on fact," the book depicts a real-life 1984 more violently dystopian than even Orwell imagined. Slowly starving strikers find themselves pitted against a prime minister--Margaret Thatcher--determined to crush them . . . a police force willing to use infiltration and violence to achieve her will . . . and equally hungry scabs who need a job . . .

Mixing real events and characters with the voices of the increasingly desperate strikers, the book becomes a stirring saga of courage against overwhelmingly sinister forces, and paints a searing and haunting portrait of events that changed the course of British history.

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:

"It's history as noir in the style of James Ellroy, political and compelling."
--Brooklyn Magazine, Eight Books to Read in November

"Peace is known more for his Red Riding Quartet, but, to my mind, this retronymic dystopia is his best book. Originally released in 2004 -- twenty years, obviously, after 1984 -- and set in Thatcherite England, the novel is an epic political hothouse and construction of genius that is, if anything, grossly underrated."
--Flavorwire, 50 Best Independent Fiction and Poetry Books of 2014

"This is a big book about one of the most important struggles in British history... As a novelistic rendering of history, GB84 is first rate."
--Barnes & Noble Review

"A behemoth of British fiction."
--Flavorwire, Must-Reads for November 2014

"A curious, intense, formally innovative thriller from the Herman Melville of soccer fiction."
--WORD Bookstores, Books of the Week, on Largehearted Boy

"Profoundly moving."
--Bookslut

"Haunting, seminal, bleak, iconic, furied... It's a necessary novel, vital even."
--The Observer

"A conspiracy thriller laced with apocalyptic poetry."
--The Independent

"The writing is clever, terse, incisive... This mammoth conspiracy tale is a thriller daubed with horror."
--The Scotsman

"Superb... [Peace] has turned the whole episode into a gripping thriller, with no detriment to documentary realis... GB84 is a bold mixture of thriller, monologue, theatre script, chants, slogans, crime story, sexual subplot and documentary fiction... This is an epic novel...a crowded, ambitious, quick-moving novel, and as such is the literary equal of the epic events it commemorates."
--The Guardian

"A violently original novel."
--The Times

"Exhilarating... Compelling."
--Times Literary Supplement

"The book is so compelling... Peace's terse, urgent sentences are perfectly suited to depicting a large-scale confrontation. The tactics and resources of both sides, their histories, their mindsets, the likely battlefields--all are vividly laid out in little more than a few paragraphs. Alliteration and repetition establish a marching rhythm like massing pickets or policemen... Only a rare political novel manages that."
--London Review of Books

November Picks, Entomology of a Bookworm

About this edition

• Publisher: Melville House Pub
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1612193935
• ISBN 13: 9781612193939
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 465