Celebrations

Description

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 bringing the differences between workers sharply into focus, Burns creates a choking atmosphere of oppression and exploitation - heightened and upended by his trademark aleatoric style, peppering with seemingly random headlines and offcuts the text, which has not lost any of either its relevance or its acerbic bite in the intervening years.

A trained lawyer, Alan Burns (1929-2013) became a celebrated novelist and playwright, loosely associated with the 1960s British experimental circle of writers led by B.S. Johnson. He is best known for Europe after the Rain (1965), Celebrations (1967), Babel (1969) and Dreamerika! (1972).

Favourable reviews... made me think I could 'be myself' and 'go for it'. Thus Celebrations might loosely be called 'more extreme' than Europe... the leaps between the images are greater, the juxtapositions bolder, the risks crazier, and so on. -- Alan Burns By far the best experimentalist in the country. * in Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth * Alan Burns's novels deserve the attention of serious readers. -- David W. Madden One of the two or three most interesting new novelists working in England. -- Angus Wilson