Faber & Faber

Faber's Editorial Director Lee Brackstone pays tribute to Gordon Burn, who has died aged 61.

I have been lucky enough to work with Gordon over the course of the past dozen years. I was introduced to his work late, in my early 20s, via Happy Like Murderers, his nightmarish book on the Wests, a book which somehow - fearlessly and unflinchingly - attempted to navigate the narrative of motive, cause and effect surrounding a case that traumatised Britain in the 90s.

Gordon's subject of choice was often trauma, spectacle and dysfunction. He was drawn to the dark side of celebrity (or, the celebration and anatomy of decadence) and his literature and impulse always represented to me an attempt to find comfort, meaning and compassion in the most appalling or baffling of events. The disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the tragic loss of Duncan Edwards, the haunting spectre-like presence of Myra Hindley over the late 20th century, the primacy - the 'necessary-ness' as Gordon himself might put it, of his great friend Damien Hirst's art: all of this was connected in his mind. And so it should be. And so, uniquely, he articulated what all of this suggested about the culture today, and about us.

Gordon was uniquely placed to make sympathetic, brave and sometimes downright obscure and provocative parallels between the worlds of sport, art, literature, entertainment and politics. Being with him was like mining at the cultural coalface with a toothpick - as a native Geordie, I hope he'd appreciate that, as much as I hope he'll forgive my rushed and inadequate prose.

But I found increasingly that Gordon's vision, his interception and interpretation of what our culture has become (vain, debased, crying out for help, for security, for relevance) was far ahead of the rest of the literary world. Quite often it was way ahead of me. I wish I'd had the chance to talk to him about the Wacko-Circus; he'd have anticipated the sad and perverse hysteria of the deification and made a kind of sense of it. I don't really feel Gordon's literary peers ever fully made sense of his genius; neither do I feel he received the accolades his fiction, non-fiction prose and work as an art critic deserved. 

Born Yesterday, his visionary novel which documents the summer of 2007, when not only Madeleine, but Tony Blair 'disappeared', will endure, perhaps as the best example of what Gordon aspired to in his fiction: a total reinvention of genre, form, method, and composition. A book, he proposed to me, he would write 'in real time' and which would document these times in the form of 'The News as a Novel'.

Having worked as a journalist with a sharp eye for a story in the 70s Gordon understood, questioned and celebrated, more than any of his peers, the advent of 24-hour news on loop; the pornographic, compulsive intensity of it. Almost as a living and reflective literary version of that summer, Gordon attempted what was effectively the fictionalised version of an art-installation. Increasingly he was interested in collage, in the spaces in-between events (Edwards dying; Best killing himself) and people (Thatcher walking her dogs in Battersea Park; Blair sliding off into well-renumerated 'retirement').

Born Yesterday, to me, represented an experiment as brave as anything attempted by Pound, BS Johnson, or Foster Wallace. More influenced by his beloved (and beloved -of-him) first generation YBAs (Hirst, Emin, Lucas etc) than any literary antecedent, the novel was rightly and intelligently praised. A part of me (not to be too Burn-aggrandising) always felt it captured the essence of that year in the same way as The Waste Land did 1922. I know this is a big statement (and comparison) for a figure at Faber to make but Born Yesterday was a bravura Modernist moment and as an art-record of Blair's annus horribilis it will remain compelling, vital, and ambiguous well into the coming decades.

I'll remember Gordon as a man who made me laugh. At the world, but mostly at myself. I'll also remember him as someone who loved people, friendship, the good times. Someone who was constantly intellectually restless and yet absolutely fulfilled at home in Chelsea (a Geordie in Chelsea, I ask you!) with Carol, his wife, and his dog. A beautiful bag of contradictions. I'll remember a writer who acknowledged it was the world and events that shaped his art (so often it's the reverse) and a man who saw-through the bullshit to find ballast in those moments when we feel most lacking in gravity.

Mostly, I'll miss him. And I'll miss the books he won't write. We have lost one of the great literary innovators of these times; a writer, I think, as crucial to our understanding of ourselves as De Lillo is to American culture. He'd blanche at these comparisons of course ... And yet secretly, love them.