In the days immediately after the European referendum, I read Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, Gordon Burn’s 1984 account of the life and crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. This must sound perverse. Surely I could have pulled something more comforting from the shelves: I Capture the Castle, say, or Love in a Cold Climate.
Actually, though, it was curiously soothing, at least in so far as the book works – and how – as a social history. Whatever we may have to endure in the years ahead, the dank, stultifying Britain that Burn depicts so intimately in his book is, I think, gone for ever. The simple fact is that what did not shock the majority then – quotidian and boundless misogyny being right at the top of the list – appals and disgusts very many of us now.
Not that I was planning on thinking about this when I picked it up. As a judge of this year’s Gordon Burn prize, I just wanted to remind myself what it was that he did (Burn died in 2009; the winning book should represent his spirit and sensibility). Quite quickly, however, I found myself obsessively noting the ways in which things have changed for the better; in the end, it was only Burn himself who made me long for the past, in the sense that I craved a world in which he was still living and working.
For Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son remains an incredible achievement. Of course it is dark; I was always braced for horror, hunched over it on the bus like someone with a pain in their stomach. But its author’s refusal to deal in anything other than facts – Burn spent three years in Bingley, Sutcliffe’s home town, researching his subject’s life – means that its atmosphere is somehow pristine, too: wholly reliable, deeply moral. Occasionally, Burn quotes Elizabeth Gaskell, who passed through Bingley on her way to see Charlotte Brontë, and with good reason: the town remains inescapably Victorian, a liminal place hunkered between the heavy industry that caused it to grow, and the countryside that still bounds it. But his style has something in common with hers, too. Its righteousness stems not from judgment, but from paying attention to things as they really are, however much he (and by extension, we) might long to look away.
