Book Festival: Reviews: Today’s Satire Will Be Tomorrow’s Documentary

By Susan Mansfield

“YOU try to write satire and the next week you find out you’re writing documentary,” says Glyn Maxwell, incredulous at the speed at which each development in reality TV outdoes the last. He and Gordon Burn joined together to express their astonishment that Jade Goody’s cancer diagnosis, delivered live on TV in India, was also an item on the Six O’Clock News.

Both have written novels which explore these developments and their implications.

Maxwell’s latest book, The Girl Who Was Going To Die, tells the story of Suzy, who becomes a reluctant celebrity simply because she is a pretty girl in the right place at the right time. Burn’s book Born Yesterday weaves together the real-life events of last summer – the floods, the terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport, Madeleine McCann, John Smeaton, Gordon Brown – with a novelist’s eye.

The drive for 24-hour news, blogs, gossip and speculation means, Burn says, that a news story is stripped of its complexity as soon as it breaks. He hopes his book will so something to “recomplicate reality”, restoring some of its “poetry and mystery”.

But using fiction to interact with the issues of the day is a common trait among novelists. On a day when a vilified Gary Glitter was again hitting the headlines, Irvine Welsh read from his new novel, Crime, which deals with the aftermath of a paedophilia case. It was a young crowd who gathered to hear him read, some bringing pints of lager and needing frequent comfort breaks. If they were expecting an extract about cocaine-filled debauchery, the author did not disappoint. But he also gave us an insight into the moral universe of his writing and the importance of standing up against injustice.

Modern society’s tendency both to overprotect and to fear children was raised by James Miller, whose first novel, Lost Boys, is described as “Peter Pan meets the war on terror”.

He read with Michael Symmons Roberts, whose novel Breath also processes current events, being set in a nameless country in the wake of a bitter civil war, asking if lasting peace and reconciliation are ever possible.

(c) 2008 Scotsman, The. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.