Gran Bretaña, 1984. El anuncio del cierre de las minas de carbón desencadena la mayor huelga de la historia británica. Durante un año, el todopoderoso Sindicato Nacional de Mineros mantendrá un pulso con el gobierno de Margaret Thatcher, quien decide tratar a los huelguistas como «the enemy within». El Judío, un oscuro ejecutivo de los servicios secretos, será la persona elegida por la primera ministra para aplastar al movimiento obrero; enfrente tendrá al carismático líder minero Arthur Scargill, el Rey Carbón, y a sus lugartenientes. Con un país en pie de guerra, ¿hasta dónde estará dispuesto a llegar un gobierno para machacar a su enemigo interno?

If you're expecting GB84 to be a work of historical fiction, laying out the ins and outs of the Miners' Strike, you're going to be disappointed in this book.

If you approach it as a satire framed as a crime thriller, you might get along with it.

It took me half the book to work out how I felt about it. My conclusion: it's an odd book. I've now read three of Peace's books and this is the second where I've found his style hard to tune into. Tokyo Year Zero was similar, with the main story interspersed with disjointed inner monologues that break off mid sentence, sitting on a left hand page in between chapters.

The crime thriller style is an interesting choice. It reminds me in places of Derek Raymond's style - all brittle, chippy sentences and world weary despair. The difference with Raymond is that I feel sympathy with his main character. Apart from Pete who organises the flying pickets, I didn't feel much at all for any of the people in GB84. Maybe I wasn't supposed to. Maybe that was the point - it wasn't about people, it was about Peace wanting to show how ridiculous the whole thing was, in some way, and that the miners were duped by Scargill and the NUM into thinking it was about jobs and lives. The structure of farcical exposé of the machinations between NUM and government against a background of MI5 weirdness, juxtaposed with the experiences of the flying pickets almost works, because I certainly felt even more depressed about this moment of British history as a result of seeing the striking miners' struggles next to the idiots with their power plays.

One thing really niggled - the naming of one character as 'the Jew'. I didn't see the need for Peace to refer to that character by his religion or ethnicity rather than his name. Or at least not without context, i.e. to clearly show the antisemitism of the establishment he was trying to break into.

Overall, GB84 isn't the book I was hoping it would be. The elements of a great book are all there - the researched facts, the intelligent suppositions about what is missing from the historical record - but the first part of the book reads as though Peace was more interested in showing off his style than writing anything meaningful, and by the end of the second part the main narrative has slipped fully into pantomime and farce. From part three, all the disparate strands start to come together, the pace picks up and I did start to feel gripped, but it shouldn't take two thirds of a book to get me to that point. There was a lull around 60 pages from the end, where I just wanted it to end but it seemed never ending. When I finally got there, the ending was simply bizarre. ( )

I didn't know anything about the British coal miner's strike in 1984-85 when I started this novel, but I read up on it a little and was extremely impressed by how Peace was able to integrate the key events of this bitter, destructive, bloody, and significant strike into a work of fiction. As with his Red Riding Quartet, which I also read on the recommendation of another LTer, Peace writes from many points of view, with little explanation, so it is often difficult to know what is going on. In the case of both the Quartet and this novel, I believe that to be intentional, because the people involved often had little idea of what is going on.

In the main part of the text, Peace delves into the lives and actions of high union officials, secret police operatives, people formerly involved in putting down the rebellions in Northern Ireland, rich people with influence and seeking influence within the Thatcher government (including one unpleasantly referred to as "the Jew" throughout), scabs (aka "working miners"), and many more. We see plots within plots, and intransigence on both sides. Thatcher was trying to make an example by breaking the powerful coal union, and the president of the union, "King" Arthur Scargill, was equally ideologically determined on the left (the union officials in this book refer to each other as "comrade"). The book makes clear the amount of money the government put into breaking the strike (paying thousands of policemen to confront thousands of pickets) and that for those on the frontlines, the level of violence and secret activity made it feel like civil war.

What truly gives the book humanity is the running narrative, at the beginning of each chapter, by two miners telling their day-by-day stories of what was happening to them, on the picket line, in their families, with the union chapter, in their communities, as less and less money came in and more and more people were beaten up by the cops. The contrast between life as it was lived by the miners, and the scheming and politics at the highest levels of the government and the union vividly demonstrates the horrifying lack of concern both of these organizations had for the people involved.

As with the Red Riding Quartet, some of the violence in this book is shocking, and Peace's style of writing is probably not for everyone. But this was a stunning book.

GB84 (not to be confused with Murakami's latest, 1Q84) is a novel in which Peace tackles the miners' strike in 1984 Great Britain. This was the strike by which Margaret Thatcher hoped to break the unions. The novel alternates a documentary style with extremely emotional stories of those involved with and touched by the strike.

While the book is fiction, Peace intensively researched this event. The characters range from the rich owners to the working poor; from the strikers to the scabs, from the highest union officials to deep within Margaret Thatcher's government. While it can be argued that the novel favors the strikers, its sympathies are sometimes ambiguous, and Peace does not hesitate to depict the violence and crimes perpetrated by the strikers (as well as that perpetrated by the government).

As in the previous novels I have read by Peace, his writing style is sometimes difficult to read, but this book is so important that it is well-worth the effort to read it. ( )

Excellent book about the miner's strike and the people involved and affected by it. Very well written and explained a lot of things to me that I was too young to know at the time. ( )