ARCHIVES 2012 / W/GB84

What do those who have been deeply wounded in their existence have left, those who were refused a place in the community, those who no longer have work and therefore no longer have social recognition, those who have nothing left but affective destitution to keep them company? Büchner in 1837 and David Peace in 2004 had a single answer, the same one: violence. A violence that overflows and sweeps away everything in its path, blind, impetuous but vital violence to not sink into self-disgust and that of others. By intertwining the drama Woyzeck and the politically engaged crime novel GB 84, Jean-François Matignon lets the voices be heard of those that history forgot, those who survive more than they thrive, those “common people” whose words are rare and precious. Between the soldier Woyzeck and the striking miner Martin Daly, two fictional characters with very real emotions, there is the same fear, the same revolt, the same feeling of being caught in a trap. The plot that Margaret Thatcher hatched to muzzle the miners' union in 1984 and the schemes of the captain and the doctor to manipulate their subordinate for their own purposes come together in the end to deny their victims their position as human beings. But beyond class conflicts, Büchner and David Peace clearly knew that behind the social archetypes were hidden individuals riddled with doubts, personal pain and dissatisfaction. This is also what goes into Jean-François Matignon's work, without any Manichaeism. JFP

With his tetralogy, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, David Peace made his mark on the contemporary crime novel. Four works that plunge the reader into the dark daily life of his region of Yorkshire made sadly famous by the crimes of “the Ripper”. Police officers, politicians or businessmen, gangsters, through a host of characters, he sketches, in an incantatory language, the palpitating, tormented and violent picture of a place, a period, confronted by chaos. With GB 84, he attacks the Thatcher years, tracing the terrible strike that pitted the Iron Lady in 1984 against all her country's miners.