Eye-Eye: Madeleine McCann, Robert Murat And Gordon Brown In The Frames
MADDIE WATCH – Anorak’s at-a-glance guide to press coverage of Madeleine McCann, Kate McCann and Gerry McCann
INVERNESS COURIER: “Media is write stuff for latest Burn tale”
Caroline Flynn is at the Inverness Book Festival. And “Gordon Burn has assembled a cast of familiar faces for his latest — and perhaps final — novel.”
His last novel. Well, it will be hard to top…
Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Madeline McCann [sic] and John Smeaton all feature in a book set in the busy summer of 2007. But it is not the characters or the plot which form the core of “Born Yesterday”.
Sounds great. God. Politics. Maddie. Terror. Go on:
“Born Yesterday” continues a major theme of much of Burn’s work — a preoccupation with celebrity. What brings the characters together is their existence in the public consciousness.
Gordon Brown is not celebrity. He told us so over when he talked about himself for an hour at the Labour Party conference. Madeleine McCann is missing. And Smeaton is a baggage handler.
“Drawing parallels between the blind eye of the new prime minister, the eye defects of Madeleine and Robert Murat, the man arrested on suspicion of her abduction, Burn threads the summer’s events together, finding pattern in the detail.”
A link. Why didn’t we see it (geddit?). Gordon met Smeaton. Gordon met McCann. Is Gordon Brown the link..?
“They were coincidences, but coincidences that no-one seemed to have noticed. I didn’t have a conversation with anyone about them, I never read about them. What made it a novel was that attempt to make links between the visible world and the invisible world, the collective consciousness. The Madeleine McCann thing happened in May and then there was the (Blair-Brown) handover in June. When it did actually happen it was so odd — Brown being so uncomfortable in front of cameras and with the press, after a lifetime in politics, was in itself sort of disconcerting.
“So there was a mood of unease generated by Madeleine and by him, and the eyes were an emblem of it. I think the book was about how those stories and images seep in — a bit like the lines of a song that gets into your brain. The coverage of news stories now is so saturated you absorb it through your pores without knowing that it’s happening.”
Do you see? [Geddirt?]
Madeleine McCann: The world in a nutshell…
Posted: 26th, September 2008 | In: Madeleine McCann, Tabloids Comments (45) | TrackBack | Permalink
