A History of Impossible Situations
With its impressively-rendered characters and the author’s present-day expeditions to such seventies dramatis loci as Derry and Aberdeen, When the Lights Went Out does in places feel more akin to Sinclair’s geographically excavative novels than to ‘conventional’ coffee-table history. It seems unlikely that this is accidental, and it definitely isn’t inapt. Hindsight tells us that the real events of the decade prompted some form of glitch in the way in which its events were perceived historically: in order to demonstrate what was, to many, an unmanageable excess of new realities, Beckett cites Peter York’s assertion that terrorism and unwanted economic novelties like stagflation engendered a set of ‘impossible new situations’.
Joe Kennedy on Andy Beckett‘s When The Lights Went Out: What Really Happened to Britain in the Seventies.