Turning news facts on their head

Although he calls his book a novel, it is more a sequence of genuine news items, cleverly spliced together in a loose a narrative and related in the third person by the writer himself.

It smoothly intertwines Tony Blair and George Bush's visit to the former's constituency in Sedgefield with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the Glasgow car bombings with the recent summer floods and anti-Iraq war campaigner Reg Keys and Iraq.

Burns is a meticulous observer of events and has done detailed research, so that the "facts" related in this novel ring profoundly true, but you are never quite sure whether everything he writes is fact or how much, if any, is pure fiction.

His writing has the feel of authenticity and expert knowledge, but is he doing exactly what the papers do - shrouding reality in media spin and hype - or is he commenting on this phenomenon?

His unusual style of writing is emphasised by the interpolation of surprising detailed, but in the end irrelevant, knowledge about, for instance, a certain medical practice, but is this anything other than authorial vanity and a flaunting of his erudition?

Does Maggie Thatcher really wander around Battersea Park with her minders on a regular basis, as he tells us?

At one point, he pointedly quotes Richard Schickel to the effect that celebrity has become the new community, steadily eroding the real ones.

We are encouraged to live vicariously as voyeurs looking in on a pseudo world of second-rate starlets, TV performers and egocentric non-entities rather than living our own lives to the full.

Burn has certainly taken time to observe and read up on contemporary life and he writes with a compelling panache, but, coming to the end of the book, you wonder what you have learned that you didn't know already from the dailies.

He muddies the dividing line between media representations of reality and reality itself, demonstrating that there is a dialectical relationship between "low" events such as a murder or a kidnapping and "high" politics, all linked by the media into one discourse, on one plane, where events are given prominence not based on their real importance or relevance but on their sensational novelty value.

Finally, Born Yesterday is a book of high promise but short on delivery and devoid of real insight.

JOHN GREEN