‘Takes you back even if you were never there originally’: class, history, and nostalgia in Gordon Burn’s The North of England Home Service

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article takes as its central focus Gordon Burn’s novel The North of England Home Service (2003). It will look at how such a text engages with deindustrialisation and social change as experienced by the British working class. A major concern is what happens to memory when it becomes commodified and appropriated by consumer society. This is explored through an engagement with and critique of the nostalgia mode and its accompanying experiences of trauma and uncertainty. How history, along with rapid social and political change, is understood and what the dangers are of an indulgent and sentimental understanding of the past are also points around which the novel is discussed. The article seeks to place Burn’s writing in relation to the often conflicting traditions of British social realism and American postmodernism. And it analyses the significance of Burn’s return to his native North East of England as a way of trying to map the working-class experience of neoliberalism and to examine how the hyperreality of contemporary culture blocks any true understanding of such a dominant historical force. What can an obsession with the past tell us about both the present and the future?