[Marxism] Novel about 1984 British Coal Strike

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Terry Eagleton reviews "GB84" by David Peace

But it was also a bare-knuckled confrontation between the capitalist state
and the working-class movement, a self-consciously epochal affair on both
sides. Both parties to the conflict had their eyes set on its world-historic
importance. There were two scripts and scenarios in play, one brief and
brutal, the other a matter of an age-old antagonism stretching back to the
Chartists.

Whatever the stake being played for, then, it was certainly not just the
coal industry. It was as though the individual characters involved - Arthur
Scargill, Margaret Thatcher, the eccentric Coal Board chairman Ian McGregor
- were simply stand-ins for historical forces in a drama that had a smack of
tragic inevitability about it. It was a showdown that history, or at least
the shift to a post-industrial Britain, was going to stage sooner or later.
...
Peace's novel ends with the striking miners hurling angry accusations of
betrayal at Old King Coal, who sounds as much like a speak-your-weight
machine as ever. But there is a movingly utopian moment as well, as the
monologuing miner has a vision of his dead, dumped and defeated comrades
marching shoulder to shoulder. GB84 is a crowded, ambitious, quick-moving
novel, and as such is the literary equal of the epic events it commemorates.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1162990,00.html


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