How the media created the summer of ‘Our Maddie’
Jim Butler reviews a memoir of last year when the disappearance of a little girl and other disturbing events showed commentators at their manipulative worst
6 June 2008

Madeleine McCann: the story of her kidnapping dominated the media for months in 2007

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel by Gordon Burn, Faber £25

'I see what I see very clearly," Gordon Burn writes in Born Yesterday. "But I don't know what I'm looking at." Today we suffer from information saturation as never before. Rolling news channels, online access, and trashy rush-hour newspapers force upon us a myriad of different viewpoints and agendas, claims and fears.

Gordon Burn, novelist and media observer, has taken the brave step of inserting himself - in both roles for which he is best known - into the events of the summer of 2007, a time, he says, "of disappearances, absences, some voluntary, others not". We watch Margaret Thatcher take lonely walks around Battersea Park with her minders; Blair departs and Brown arrives; Madeleine McCann becomes "Our Maddie" and car-bombs and floods blight the land.

Born Yesterday is a meditation on glamour and death, grief and celebrity, and how the media and the mind work tricks in shaping our perception of the world.

The key to the book is in its subtitle. On one level, Burn appears (slightly awkwardly, it must be said) in the text as a third-person participant, travelling the country in the manner of W G Sebald, haunting the constituencies of Blair and Brown and the McCann's house in Rothey, Leicestershire, making shrewd observations about the events of "that summer".

Given the timescales involved, Burn must have written such lines with the future in mind, the ever-closing gap between an event and its memory, the invitation to memorialise what has only just occurred, another sign of the times that, if one is generous, one would say the author explores, or, less generously, falls foul of.

Even if the latter is true, the insight he offers forgives much. Blair's disappearance from "the national static", Burn notes, "was eerie, its stage management both calculated and, in its eventual effects, unexpectedly unsettling".

He is scathing of Gordon Brown, describing him as "an analogue politician in a digital age ... the embodiment of piety, careerism, and a darkling soul", and acutely perceptive in the media's treatment of Kate and Gerry McCann, their rough accents contrasting with their upwardly mobile status as doctors, their businesslike composure unfavourably compared to that of the parents of murdered schoolboy Rhys Jones, who looked "how people are expected to look when the comfortable façade of life has been torn away".

There is, too, the suggestion that all news is a novel. The question, of course, is where the border between fact and fiction lies, if there is one, and what suggestions of connectivity between items might mean.

Burn, though, is not one to provide answers. Instead, he describes a world where causing or being on the receiving end of grief is the fastest route to celebrity and missing-persons appeals are promoted in the same way as a new blockbuster -_a world in which we are left trying to fathom a frustrating sense of uncanniness to everything, a sense that we are standing on the threshold of understanding only to come up short at the last moment. A case in point: a woman the author meets dog-walking starred in the Blair satire The Thick of It with Chris Langham, who during his trial for downloading obscene images of children was represented by Angus McBride of Kingsley Napley; two weeks later McBride was representing the McCanns as they sought the return of their daughter from suspected child abusers; on their appeal website, they used a song by Bryan Adams, who lives a short distance from where the two dog-walkers meet. What does it all mean? Everything. Nothing.

Burn largely chooses not to interrogate his data, one suspects because if he were to do so this illusion of uncanniness would be dispelled.

Writing of the footballing tributes that followed the death of Rhys Jones - the minute's applause and the autographed replica shirts at the makeshift shrine - Burn skirts around the links between sport and victim culture without ever making explicit the idea that, these days, only football and a voyeuristic obsession with the suffering of others provide an experience in which the whole country can share.

When he does make an attempt to go beyond allusion, the result is a touch underwhelming. "Their experience of trauma was what the McCanns [and] Gordon Brown ... had in common," he says, referring to the childhood rugby accident that cost the Prime Minister his sight in one eye and now makes it hard for him to smile naturally.

The point is, of course, that connections can always be found. Seeing patterns is inevitable, and necessary, but the challenge of the modern age is to be able to sift the true from the false, the deliberate from the coincidental. Crucially, though, Burn does not miss what makes Brown and the McCanns different - and in the media age, it is an important difference: Brown is seen as "uncomfortable at the mingling of the public and the private, ill-at-ease with the expected opening up of a life for public examination and comment".

However many misgivings the McCanns must have had about such displays, and however suspicious the media may have become about their "performances", the same could rarely be said of Kate and Gerry's public personas.

Born Yesterday can come across as slight because Burn refuses to engage in such analysis to any great degree, but this frustration is, I believe, exactly what we are being asked to feel. It is an important book because it stares unflinchingly at the data deluge without muttering conspiracy or dealing in absolutes. Information is transformed in the telling, interwoven strands from disparate stories informing and deceiving each other, hinting at a grand chimerical truth that recedes the harder we try to reach it.

The best we can hope for, Burn seems to suggest, is on analysing the facts as we understand them and noting the points where they intersect, we neither deny nor make too much of apparent connections. Only in such a way can we hope to navigate the scrambled electronic wasteland in which we find ourselves.