WHETHER IT is for the variety shows, postwar London, the death of community values in the North East or simply for those years when one’s body didn’t constantly jar and protest, nostalgia infects Gordon Burn’s new novel as endemically as the foot-and- mouth crisis that provides its macabre backdrop.

Society’s maladies are Burn’s primary interest. His first two novels, the award- winning Alma Cogan and the despairing Fullalove, both concentrated on them, as did his biographies of Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West. Measured against its predecessors The North of England Home Service seems a gentler book, but it nevertheless houses disquieting truths at its core.

Burn’s novel turns on the contemporary lives and decades-long career paths of two men, the comedian Ray Cruddas and the former boxer Jackie Mabe. Ray prospered in regional variety shows before the BBC projected his fame nationwide; at its apogee he was a member of Margaret Thatcher’s “kitchen cabinet”. By 2001 he has returned to Newcastle, compering at a club that recreates a “frankly romanticised Geordie past”.

His aide-de-camp, Jackie, has been with him since they met in Fifties London. Jackie’s title hopes disintegrated along with his knee during a bout at the Empress Hall, but his relationship with the promoter Jack Solomons kept him in the Soho demi-monde of errand- running and bodyguarding.

Ray and Jackie’s twin histories are recounted in a romantic and self-consciously clichéd manner that juxtaposes harshly with their modern-day interactions with odious neo-industrialists and coke-snorting footballers.

But Burn, an astute commentator on the topographical shifts and attendant social ramifications caused by the collapse of heavy industry in the North East, is far too intelligent a writer to endorse a simplistic binary opposition between a golden past and tarnished present. Instead he makes individual human relations his primary concern.

In a book thick with intelligent metaphor, the use of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is its only sacrifice to the blatant. The play is described here as being about two tramps who struggle to survive life, but “the closer they get . . . the more impossible it is for them to unite.”

To this end we see Marzena, Ray’s wife, losing herself in longing for her homeland when Ray is working on match days at the stadium next to their house, the crowd’s ululations providing her with a blanket of white noise beneath which she can mourn.

But Burn provides a chink of light on the final page that suggests Ray and Jackie’s partnership might stand as an amendment to Sartre’s maxim that “Hell is other people”; that, finally, other people are both the best and worst that life has to offer us.

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