Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel

(, Main)

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The news - all news now - is essentially fiction: an accretion of rumour, surmise, spin and speculation, gathered around a tiny nucleus of verifiable fact. There is increasingly little of what, back in the days pre-dating the worldwide web and the blogosphere and rolling news and insistent, 24-hour interactivity (email-us-your-pictures! Tell-us-what-you-think!), used to be thought of as the plain, unvarnished truth.



In the digital age, the news is a novel - it's a bunch of novels, instantaneously, as soon as the first reports of the latest breaking story start ticker-taping across the foot of the screen. So the news AS a novel makes sense: the novel as a found-object, with a gripping plot and convincing characters, engaging directly with our here and now.



This is the starting point for Born Yesterday. It is set in our immediate moment of car-bombings and summer floods and the unexpected public traumas and rituals attending the smoking ban; a period of maybe only 28 days, when both the new Prime Minister and the ex-PM remained unknown quantities and undigested phenomena, and the era of 'celebrity government' was believed to be at an end.



Born Yesterday will set out to provoke by doing only what the media do on a daily basis: blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, between the news and the novel, between what is real and what has been invented. Refusing the benefits of hindsight, it is a barefaced appropriation of a news story unspooling in real time, with its real events and real people being claimed for fiction in a deliberate and overt, rather than in the customarily covert, media-slick, unremarked-upon way.

Author Bio

Gordon Burn is the author of four novels, Alma Cogan (winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize), Fullalove, The North of England Home Service and Born Yesterday. He is also the author of the non-fiction titles Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, Pocket Money, Happy Like Murderers, On The Way to Work (with Damien Hirst) and Best and Edwards.