YOU couldn't make it up. John Smeaton foils suicide bombers and is hailed a hero. They stand and cheer him at Ibrox, the Labour Party Conference and when he swings his kilt for Tyra Banks at a glittering awards ceremony in New York, a city which loves its firefighters and other quiet, valorous men.
Then the backlash begins. He didn't do it, at least not in the manner described on YouTube – replayed so often that a switch of name to YaChoob was considered – and sprayed across so many T-shirts that finally Glasgow could claim for itself a joke-we
lcome to rival the old Edinburgh one about tea requiring to be consumed beforehand… "We'll set aboot ye!"
How would Smeaton, the baggage-handler, answer his critics? He knew the truth about what happened at Glasgow Airport that day, but he was also smart enough to know that some people – perhaps including a number who had bought him, via the blogosphere, those thousands of pints of beer as thanks for his bravery – might now be doubting him. How could he hit back or, better still, rise above the petty squabbling and raise his cult status on to a more rarefied plane?
Simple. Smeato – The Novel.
It almost doesn't matter now, the who-was-there, who-did-what, who-really-banjoed-the-burning-terrorist? For Smeato, Smeats, The Smeatonator, has had the dignity of print conferred on him. By one of Britain's finest writers as well.
Gordon Burn has written the greatest book there's been about tabloid journalism (Fullalove) and he's won through to the semi-finals – alongside Hunter Davies, Arthur Hopcraft and David Peace – for the greatest about football (Best And Edwards). Now you can't help wondering if he's just showing off.
Born Yesterday is subtitled "The news as a novel". Over the course of its 214 pages, real events, real tragedies, real people – and real heroes and real chancers – jostle for space. Tony Blair is in there. So is Gordon Brown. And the McCanns: Gerry, Kate and poor Madeleine. And Kate Middleton and JK Rowling and Arctic Monkeys and Lady Mucca (Heather Mills – come on, keep up) and the odd Wimbledon hopeful, and so many nameless casualties of foot-and-mouth, bank collapses, flooding and that other terrifying elemental power, political spin. Virtually everyone who was in the news last summer is in the book. And so is Smeato.
It should be said that John Smeaton, of Erskine, didn't commission Born Yesterday. Burn has blended fact and fiction before, but never as bravely as here (and of course I don't mean "bravely" in the Smeato sense). Is it, though, a "novel"? Don't ask such stupid questions or I'll set aboot ye. Questions about "fiction" hardly apply when we don't know what "news" is anymore. And they're rendered redundant by writing as good as these paragraphs, describing Gordon Brown's escape back to Scotland, and his constituency office in Cowdenbeath: "The rumpled suit, the dusty box files, the calcified kettle, the tottering piles of yellowing papers… his minders yawning, kicking their heels. It resurrected images of Old Gordon, the bedsit swot, got a briefcase for Christmas and loved it, 42 years old the day he was born. The Gordon who often seemed to bristle with displeasure when surrounded by human beings… given to brooding, introspection and suspicion. He'd always have his homework done and never let you copy.
"Gordon by then, however, had made a marvellous new friend who would protect him in the playground and had provided him with an ingenious solution… " And this is where John (cue Brown at the party conference: "That man, that hero") Smeaton enters the action.
Gordon Burn is also a rumpled suit kind of guy. When we met to discuss his football book he wanted to take me on a tour of George Best's favourite pubs. He spoke of Chelsea, where he lives, as a community. Unable to think past the greedy footballers at the club bearing the borough's name, I doubted this was the case. But then Burn probably believes in society as well.
Margaret Thatcher didn't, and she's the first big name to heave into view, as a frequenter of the park where Burn walks his dog. Burn remembers Mrs T, a few days out of office, unable to muster a plumber by herself. On the next page, Tony Blair's long goodbye from office is ending with a journey in a rust-bucket with 42,000 miles on the clock. The once-powerful, flailing around in the real world, suddenly at the mercy of society.
This is the first of many connections in the book – between the news-makers themselves, between their teams of spinners and fixers and cheerleaders, and between all the news that swilled around in the summer of 2007 and all the waste ("strangers' turds floating in your kitchen") as a result of all the flooding.
Burn becomes obsessed with the connections. In his study, unable to sleep, he's hypnotised by the eye on the spine of Fullalove, that of a fluffy toy. No one will believe this, he writes, but it's almost identical in its imperfection to the right eye of Madeleine McCann, whose "Cuddle Cat" is carried everywhere by her mother in the first weeks of her disappearance. And the connections are contagious. When he lists the credits of the "young tellyworld presenter" co-opted into Gordon Brown's "big tent" of talent, then lists the credits of her small-screen impresario father, I shout out "Z Cars! Theme tune is Everton FC's run-out song! Madeleine supports Everton and wears their blue! Missed that one!"
As if to escape the news, voraciously feeding off itself, Burn heads back to his roots in the north-east of England, which of course are also those of Blair. He looks up Norman Cornish, "the pitman painter" and subject of Burn's first published newspaper article 30 years before. Cornish's world has long since disappeared, but he won't comment on Blair, his era of "bling and flash briefings", or Brown's new world order of "boiled grey woollen socks and strict moral compass". At last, you think, someone who refuses to talk, to add to the great steaming pile of "news".
In the final pages, Burn makes another journey, to Brown's home in North Queensferry. GB – he likes to initialise the connections – is going in search of GB. Asked by police officers to explain the purpose of his visit, he tells them it's been a summer of disappearances – some voluntary, others not. He's interested in "self-erasure" and wants to see the Prime Minister's house when he's not in it. "Oh aye, a writer?" says one of officers. "What kind?"
Bit of both. Fact – or what passes for it now – and fiction. News and – well, what is it these days… post-news? Imagine the news, all of it, as being like a clunking carousel. I know who I want – "that man, that writer" – for baggage-handler.
Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn, Faber and Faber,£7.99.
