Product Description

The 1984 miners' strike brought to vivid, painful and dramatic life by David Peace. Here he describes the entire civil war, with corruption from government to boardroom, and all the tumultuous violence, passion and dirty tricks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3316 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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
"'We will see much discussion of the strike this year... None will be more atmospheric, affecting, thoughtprovoking and readable than GB84.' Yorkshire Post; 'A conspiracy thriller laced with apocalyptic poetry.' Independent; 'The British James Ellroy, Peace has also moved from the crime genre to a broader, bloodier canvas, excavating the dank world of Eighties politics.' Jack; 'GB84 is a crowded, ambitious, quick-moving novel, and as such is the literary equal of the epic events it commemorates.' Terry Eagleton, Guardian; 'An enormously significant novel.... It's hard to think of another writer who could capture that picture so suggestively and so thrillingly.' Sunday Times; 'Haunting, seminal, bleak, iconic, furied.' Observer"

Literary Review, March 204
GB84 is a novel of ambitious political scope and sustained anger, defiantly out of step with these times.