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: #16051 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.

Customer Reviews

Scab! Scab! Scab!
I came to this book after reading Peace's brilliant "The Damned United" and found it another very powerful piece of writing. I am old enough to remember the miner's strike and the huge divisions it caused throughout the country. Peace has managed to convey this with the number of plots and sub plots that run through the book. Some of these do not quite work, however, what does come across and what Peace describes with great clarity is the anger and the sense of the inevitablity of the strike's conclusion. Anyone who feels nostalgic for the Thatcher years should read this book.

Underworld UK
It's always been a given that David Peace is in hock to another crime writer with the initials J.E. and it's probably also the case that he's sick of hearing about it. However, he can't help but invite comparisons by following up a dark, region-specific quartet of crime books with a broader, more political novel that occurs chronologically after the last book. So this, then, is Peace's 'American Tabloid', and as Ellroy retreated to more conventional prose style after the ultra-lean, hyper-wired, beatnik-isms of 'White Jazz', so too does Peace abandon the more surreal, stylised linguistic curlicues that characterised '1980' and '1983' for a more prosaic, less-frenzied and sadly less poetic approach. This is certainly a pity, as with these last two books he was close to forging a distinctive authorial voice of his own. I, for one, was certainly awaiting his next novel with interest

That said, this novel is far from being a disappointment. In some ways, the Miner’s Strike and it’s various political and contributory sub-strata is perfect subject matter for Peace. Well structured, informative and still topical 20 years after the events it describes, Peace doesn't really put a foot wrong. As someone raised by Tories and who was 8 years old at the time, it certainly made me consider the media portrayal of events that I’ve not thought about for years. Best digested in as few as sittings as possible so as to keep track of the various minions of various trade unions, it has enough ‘secret’ (or ‘occult’, as Peace would have it) history and factual verisimilitude to work on both the intended levels. Occasionally, it’s downright thrilling, if never quite audacious enough to make you drop the book in disbelief at what you’re reading. One just can't help feeling that, while more relevant to UK readers, the subject-matter isn't as epoch-defining as the Bay of Pigs and assassination of JFK, and Arthur Scargill will never have the dark charisma and Wodehousian gift for the acerbic comment that Ellroy ascribes to J. Edgar Hoover.

Again, watching with curiosity to see what subject he moves to next.

Diamond hard and incredibly powerful
Quite simply this is one of the most forceful and relentless slabs of prose I've ever encountered - and although I may not have succeeded in making it sound like it, that's a definite compliment. People may gripe about the echoes of Ellroy (which I personally feel are less of a big deal than they're made out to be), but Ellroy never made me well with tears at the same time as his writing made me feel like I'd been punched in the throat. Astonishing, in a word.