Book 55 - GB84 by David Peace

Reading date - January 2021

This book is about the miners' strike of 1984.  The year I was born.  

I enjoyed this book because it told the story of what was going on from both sides.  On one side, it had the miners and on the other side it had the unions and the MPs who were in charge of sorting the issues out.  Of course, everyone knows what happened as we no longer have a mining industry or community of note in the UK.  

One of the books I read last year which wasn't reviewed on here was the Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell and that gave me a fantastic background into what it would have been like to live as a miner and how dark, dirty and dangerous the job was.  My best friend's grandad was a miner and he has dark lines on his forehead where the coal has settled in his skin.  It is fascinating to me but I don't obviously go staring at him cos I am not a moron.

Anyway, this book is interesting as it shows how hopeless the situation was and also how violent the situation was for the striking miners.  It also covers in detail how some people resented that even though these miners were striking for fair working conditions, they still got a decent Christmas because people donated money towards them.

The other side, the MP side also shows how much the MP struggled to get anything done but I have very little sympathy for the man because he was always just trying to buttfuck Maggie T.  The book covers the bombing at the Grand, too.

The writing style takes a bit of getting used to as both stories are spliced together.  The story of the miners (various) is headed and double columned in the book, I think to give a sense of how urgent and erratic their lives must have been.  It focuses on mainly two miners and what annoys me is that their chapters always finish in the middle of sentences so by the time you come back to the next chapter about them, you forget what was said before.  There is no need for this because it's not as if the next chapter about the the MP/union has anything pressing that could not have waited a few words.

Some of the sentences are written really short, again to force through the message of how urgent certain things were but I feel it falls a bit here as I felt like William Shatner (Bill Shitz to those in the know) reading it.

Also, it is a confusing book.  There are a lot of characters and a lot of acronyms which are not explained at the start of the book, I would have appreciated this as I had to constantly Google to find out what they meant.  If you lived through the time then I assume it would be easier for you to know what they stood for.  There is back-stabbing, murder, affairs and roughing up of miners but you're never really clear who does what and I was left a bit confused when I finished the book so I had to carry out more Googling to be sure that what I understood was what actually happened.

I read this book as a pre-cursor to getting the Red Riding set by the same author and now I am glad I did as I am double thinking if I want to read the Red Riding set if the writing style is the same.  I will try and get it from the library if ever we are allowed back into it!