Bøker av Alan Burns

Celebrations, Alan Burns's third novel, brings the inherent violence and oppression so apparent in Europe after the Rain into the setting of a family-owned factory, where social hierarchies, legal structures and humiliation keep the workers in line.

By turns comic and tragic, tender and brutal, religious and blasphemous, the narrative rockets from London to the United States to Vietnam to interstellar space, familiar events are constantly fragmented and reset into new patterns, and ultimately Babel becomes a cautionary tale about the tragedy arising from attempting to build Utopia.

Upon the novel's first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the `collective unconscious' of the twentieth century - in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm.