"England was a seance"

Book review time

I did a lot of reading in the month of August, and one of the book I read was David Peace’s GB84. It’s a freakishly dystopic depiction of the “Second English Civil War”—the 1984-1985 miners’ strike, a major industrial action that pitched the National Union of Mineworker (NUM) and the British working class more broadly against Thatcher’s government, the combined forces of the UK’s well-oiled security apparatuses, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and fascistic counterinsurgency-paramilitary underground. Under the leadership of Arthur Scargill, the miners’ strike began in Yorkshire and spilled out from there, crossing the country, drawing adjacent industrial and trade unions into the fray, before running head-long into the abyss—a brutal crushing of working class insurrection and, in the end, mass privatization of formerly state-owned industrial enterprises.

GB84 is not a pleasant read in the slightest sense of the word (and why should the subject be?), and in Peace’s hands the narrative walks a tightrope between several strands. In the foreground is a combination of the strike presented as pure tedium, an unending litany of upcoming events that are planned for, then are skipped over in the blink of an eye (he would rather give detailed descriptions of the dreary automobile travel routes into England’s north than give the internal mechanics of, say, the strategic blunders of the NUM during the Battle of Ogreave). Insofar as the lived experience of the miners are expressed, that story is relegated to interludes lodged between chapters, which provide a blow-by-blow account of the violent suppression, the protests, the chaos of the union halls, and the battalions of Thatcher’s scabs and skull-busting goons that descended upon the working class like a plague.

These interludes are presented in rapid, stream-of-conscious fashion, small blips that break up GB84’s primary concern: the delicate palace wars that unfolded in both the NUM itself and the Thatcherite paramilitarized British state. In the corner of the former are a host of vague, scarcely-sketched characters like “The Jew”, something of an emissary between Thatcher and the business world (Robert Maxwell, a favorite of this blog, makes a perfunctory appearance) and to the counterinsurgency machine. Another is Neil Fontaine, something of an agent for “The Jew” with ties to security state and to a sprawling network of military operators, Neo-Nazis and skinheaded hoodlums.

On the side of the NUM, Peace utilizes mild stand-ins for various historical persona. NUM’s president Arthur Scargill simply becomes The President, and Roger Windsor, NUM’s chief executive officer, is renamed Terry Winters. Much of the action that unfolds between is a slow-moving, cumbersome, and almost impossible to understand dance, with both sides of the equation attempting to out-smart the other. If the reader can barely follow the train of events, it’s by careful design: Peace himself has stated that he is unsure of the real plot coursing through the novel. We are treated, however, to delightful sequences of the NUM trying to hide their funds in the offshore financial system, utilized shells and real estate holdings routed through the financial services industry of the Isle of Man.

One of the most luminous sequences in the novel is the voyage undertaken by Terry Winters/Roger Windsor into the heart of Libya in an effort to raise support from the revolutionary government of Ghaddafi. On board jeep he travels too and from a tent meeting with ‘The Colonel’, and sees himself riding into the scarlet pages of history—

The jeep took them back to Tripoli. Through the desert and the end of the night—
The dawn rising out of the desert with the city. Like a mirage, thought Terry—
‘—I fly for refuge unto the Lord of the Daybreak’, quoted Salem from the Koran. ‘That he may deliver me from those things of mischief which he hath created—’
Terry nodded. He had never seen a dawn like this in his whole life. It was extraordinary—
The dawn. The stars. The food. The people. Their leader. The whole country—
‘People back home could have seen me with the Colonel’, said Terry—

—but the euphoric rush, the delirium of apparent revolutionary momentum is, like the miners’ strike itself, crushed upon his return to Europe. In the historical course of events, Roger Windsor’s Libyan excursion was revealed in the press at a most critical juncture. Just months prior, a twenty-five year old Metropolitan Police officer named Yvonne Fletcher, had dispatched as part of a time to monitor growing anti-Ghaddafi demonstrations outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in London’s St. James Square. At 10:38 AM on April 17, 1984, a volley of automatic machine gun fire was seemingly sprayed from the windows of the People’s Bureau. Fletcher was killed by a single bullet, and public opinion rapidly shifted against Colonel Ghaddafi. The sight of a high-level NUM officer with the Libyans certainly helped crack popular support for the strike.

Aside an aside, there have been a number of individuals who have pushed back against that the Libyans were responsible for Fletcher’s death, suggesting instead that what happened was something of a false flag to help push the quasi-warm reception of Ghaddafi’s government by certain western elements and the public more broadly into line with the more stark opposition being mounted by the Thatcher and Reagan governments. One such individual was the journalist (maybe?) Joe Vialls, who uncovered evidence that the Hughes Tool Company maintained secretive offices located adjacent to the Libyan People’s Bureau.

Hughes Tool—a diversified conglomeration of vastly different business enterprises that was just one corner of the disparate Howard Hughes economic web—had a long history of involvement with American intelligence services. By the late 1970s and 1980s, two Hughes men who had intimate involvement with the company (Robert Maheu and George Pendar) maintained high levels in FIDCO, an intelligence front company with direct ties to the Reagan White House and which was very active in Middle Eastern and North Africa affairs.

Vialls, working from raw BBC footage of the shooting, came to the conclusion that the spray of bullets came from the Hughes Tool building—but maybe not as is what it seems here. As is often the case with personalities in conspiratorial circles, other researchers came to believe that Vialls himself might have been some kind of disinfo agent sent out to spread murk and confusion around the Fletcher case. Before his near-every trace vanished from the internet, it did seem that Vialls was a little too well-positioned, well-connected (he had previously worked for Hughes Tool, after all), and ready to offer so-called insider information on a litany of difference events, occurrences, and conspiracies. An alternative analysis of bullet trajectories came to a much different conclusion than the one offered by Vialls: they seem to have come from a different building in St. James Square, one utilized by British intelligence as a listening post to capture signals intelligence from the Libyan People’s Bureau.

This whole Libyan subplot is draped with a very appropriate sense of paranoia by Peace. While he doesn’t venture into the very real questions around Yvonne Fletcher’s death, he does paint Terry Winters/Roger Windsor’s North African voyage as the result of a carefully-calculated ploy by British intelligence, one designed precisely to paint the NUM in as negative light as possible. This open a host of other questions, like that raised Seumas Milne’s book The Enemy Within, which suggests that Roger Windsor himself was an MI5 operative sent into the NUM to disrupt its activities. These charges were taken so seriously that in December, 1995 they were entered into parliamentary record.

***

Many commentators have noted that GB84 is something of spiritual capstone to Peace's earlier work, the Red Riding Quartet, serving as a sort of sideways palimpsest that allows the actual political content and stakes of those books to bubble to the surface. GB84 and Red Riding share a common setting—the gloom of England northern territories, and Yorkshire in particular—and the each year that the quarter spans (1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983) takes the narrative to GB84's doorstep, the year of the miners’ strike and the apex of Margaret Thatcher's brutal counterrevolution.

Some have suggested that the thematic continuity between these two halves highlights a weak point the tale that GB84 weaves. Mark Fisher did this a bit with his suggestion that Peace’s deployment of byzantine criminality in the context of a political work is a hangover from the unmistakable influence of James Ellroy:

One of the differences between the Red Riding novels and GB84 is a switch from religion and theodicy (there must be a God to make good all that suffering, all those atrocities) to politics (there must be a better way to live than this). (As it happens, though, I think that Peace's tendency at that time to "add a layer of diabolical evil on top of the historical evils [he] fictionalise[s]" is a mistake, part of the [bad] lurid legacy from Ellroy. Judging from this interview in Socialist Worker, Peace agrees, saying that he "slightly regrets" some of the Crime elements in GB84.

I think I have to disagree with Fisher’s assessment here, though I might be a little biased because I like Ellroy, even if his Second L.A. Quarter threatens to spill over into self-pastiche, if not outright self-parody (I actually followed up GB84 with Ellroy’s recent and truly weird politico-crime novel The Enchanters, which follows Fred O’Tash—a real life private eye and politically-connected fixer—through the streets of Los Angeles in the summer of ‘62 on his hunt for a psychopathic burglar dubbed the “Sex Creep”, all the while being dragged into maze-like cat-and-mouse games being run by Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. It’s one his better books in many years).

The question of crime in GB84 revolves around a fragile content and form dialectic that seems to define Peace’s approach to these stories. In the fractured narrative of Red Riding there is a progressive and effective deconstruction of ‘the story’ into higher levels of abstraction and religious-tinged hallucination. The trappings of hardboiled fiction fall away, the plot unwinds into an inscrutable fog and what the reader is left with is a barrage of events, sequences, and oblique images that are presented through a rhythmic repetition of sentences, slogans, slang, and musical lyrics shotgun-blasted across the page, but we can scarcely render them intelligible.

That same stylistic approach is on full deployment in GB84: despite the ostensible topic at hand—the miners’ strike and the deep state machinations striving to annihilate it—Peace almost seems totally preoccupied with giving us a succession of macabre images that may (or may not) have signal some deeper symbolic function. A wiretapping expert, haunted by the losses he must experience every time he turns on his reluctantly voyeuristic tapes, bleeds from his ears (he has been digging into them with a pair of scissors). A neo-fascist agent who stands at the stitching point of the overt and covert worlds dreams each night of candles and skulls; he eventually commits ritualistic suicide via disembowelment. People get beheaded. A counterinsurgency specialist brought in to direct violent scab operations goes rogue and embarks on a crime spree, blasting his way across the British countryside. Each of these and others hang in an odd limbo with respect to the rest of the narrative, but they paradoxically act as anchors to the various strands and strings in place.

This is what I think critics of GB84’s criminal aspects are missing—every time that this element crops up, it is woven to these uncanny and highly image-oriented dimensions of the tale. This convergence also challenges Fisher’s imposed line drawn between the ‘religious’ orientation of the Red Riding quartet’s latter half and the ‘political’ ambitions of GB84.

Religion is found in the pages of Red Riding in two modes. It first comes, as Fisher pointed out, in the form of a negative theology: God is ever-present, but he instantiates in this world only as lack, a profound Subtraction. The existence of God, in other words, is felt only through his absence. Or, to put it even more simply: the world is marked by shadow, but the reality of this infinite shade means that somewhere, in realms we cannot hope to glimpse, there is an equally-infinite outpouring of light that makes it possible.

The second mode is the disruptive image that often appears as horrifying. This is clearly indebted not to the expressions of religion of the New Testament, but the books of the Old Testament. Think of the experience of Ezekiel. He had been swept along into captivity in Babylon when, dwelling among the exiles near the banks of the Kebar Canal (often identified as the Khabur river in present-day Syria), he beheld a tesseractic image in the skies, surrounded by fire and thunder and glowing metal, of four interlaced beings oriented in the four cardinal directions. The voice of God poured through the image and it sounded like “the tumult of an army”. It’s spooky stuff, and the Old Testament is full of this type of thing (the burning bush that Moses encountered would be another, albeit more low-key, variation on this theme).

Clearly these two modes operate in fairly inverse ways with one another. The first can be summed up as: something that should be present is absent. The second: something is present that should not be there. Nothing as extreme as Ezekiel’s visitation in the desert takes place in Red Riding, but the culmination of the quartet’s third volume dips into Biblical territory when the protagonist, an alcoholic journalist, undergoes trepanation by a heretical priest and seemingly expires. He is then present inside a church with a number of other individuals, including a young girl who had died at the hands of the unspeakable evil stalking the moors and villages of northern England.

This sequence is quasi-mirrored near the end of GB84 but the redemptive edges are sheered off. The tormented wiretapper is killed and, buried underground, finds himself in the company of those he had killed in some British counterinsurgency operation somewhere in Africa. In both instances we’re transported from the material cosmos to the land of the dead, but thanks to Peace’s stylistic peculiarities both are sunken down into a state of absolute ambiguity. (Interestingly, at one point the audio tapes that the wiretapper had put together are described as wheels within wheels, the forever-turning of the spools that capture, within their narrow band, the infinite complexity of plots and counterplots cutting through and across the miners’ strike. But this phrase does come from the Book of Ezekiel; they’re the description of the motive power of the angelic being that came from the heavens to greet him).

Or maybe the dramatic stage of these novels always sat on some obscure borderland. In Red Riding the detective Peter Hunter is called in to assess the case files of the Yorkshire Ripper—along with a hidden mandate to probe for corruption and malfeasance. Returning to the old and tattered pages of those files is described as a “seance”. And then, in GB84, we’re told that “England was a seance”—as the miners’ strike plummeted the country into a Cold Civil War, the forgotten and suppressed history of England itself ruptured back into the present.

Trucks full of troops being deployed. Lorryloads of shaven heads—
‘—There is in no sense a crisis’—
There were curfews in English villages. There were curfews on English estates—
‘—no state of emergency—’
Fitzwilliam. Hemsworth. Grimethorpe. Wombell. Shirebrook. Warsop.
‘—a touch of midsummer madness—’
York Minster had been struck by lightening. York Minster was burning—
‘—acts of God’—
Malcolm Morris stood among the crowd of ten thousand people at the Durham Miners’ Gala and listened to the speeches—
‘—we will at the end of the inflict upon Mrs. Thatcher the kind of defeat we imposed upon Ted Heath in 1972 and 1974—’
The specters. Rising from the dread. The rectors. Raising up the dead—
The old ghosts, without and within—

Or, as Marx put it: “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. With each revolutionary moment they rupture into the present as living history, and with each revolutionary defeat they become another archaism shelved within the long wait for earthly parousia.