ABSTRACT
The late Gordon Burn and his novel The North of England Home Service (2003) are the primary focus of Chapter 2. It looks at how a contemporary British writer engages with deindustrialisation and social change as experienced by an industrial working-class community. In Burn’s novel a commodified nostalgia prevents an enabling and positive future for its working class. A central 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 chapter draws comparisons to the obsessions and narrative techniques of those writers who have sought to critique postmodernism as a historical and cultural turn, alongside presenting an analysis of how Burn’s text engages with the tropes of North East working-class fiction and the region’s cultural traditions. In what way the novel echoes and, in turn, works through the poetics of contrasting literary forms in attempting to map the experiences of a distinctly (de)industrial working-class community is a key focus. The North of England Home Service is an attempt to record and reflect upon social change, deindustrialisation, memory, and nostalgia while exploring the causes and consequences of such processes in relation to place, space, and class.
