The North of England Home Service by Gordon Burn

The comedian Ray Cruddas was once as well known as Jimmy Tarbuck and Ted Rogers. Dropped from Thatcher's guest list and never making New Labour's, he acknowledges that the good days are over and returns in old age to Tyneside. Here he dreams up Bobby's, an "authentic" club in a factory unit, where the décor feeds the bottomless appetite for a heavy industrial past full of kitchen mangles, clippy rugs and outside lavatories. Bobby's is somewhere even parties of slumming businessmen, smirking among the ordinary punters, come to feel themselves "cast back to a time when nobody spoke of 'community' and everybody belonged to one."

Can Gordon Burn be accusing the Geordies, his own people, of sentimentality? Yes, in part, but the past is a complicated matter, especially when inhabited by people whose most pressing business is to endure life rather than analyse it. The authentic and the fraudulent are inextricably linked, Burn's novel suggests. Illusions are essential, despite the disillusionment they carry. The history he presents, using a mixture of the actual and the imagined, and at times wielding an Orwellian eloquence, is worth the price of the book in itself.

Ray's club, owned by millionaire builder Ronnie Cornish, is named after Bobby Thompson, "The Little Waster", the most revered of the North-east comedians, yet unknown south of Middlesbrough. Burn quotes a comment by Thompson about his audience: "It's like they look at me and see something in themselves they're afraid they're going to lose."

Ray Cruddas excites no such passion. His strongest suit is reassuring pleasantness – comedy with the heart and history removed, lacking Thompson's instinctive solidarity, but polished in innumerable radio programmes on the North of England Home Service until Ray was claimed by national television.

Ray's loyal, unblinking minder is Jackie Mabe, an ex-boxer whose past is traced in equally intense detail, from illegal outdoor bouts through Joe Solomons's Devonshire Sporting Club to the brink of the big time, before injury finishes him. The traffic between sport, crime and showbusiness is by no means unfamiliar, but the meticulously understated prose gives it substance, dramatising the strange marriage of cruelty and affection in the drinking clubs of postwar London.

Suddenly running out of pages, the reader may wonder what The North of England Home Service has been for. The book reads like a documentary poem: events, names and atmospheres are valued for their own lost sakes rather than as the furniture of narrative. The real impetus is retrospective, which leaves the here and now belated and beside the point. Without naming it, Burn captures exactly the mixture of pride and insecurity which characterises this most resilient and fiercely defended of English working-class cultures at the moment when its coherence and integrity may be truly under threat.

Time and forgetting are inescapable dangers. But Burn also depicts the ignorant carelessness of self-made Northern moneymen like Cornish who brandish their roots like the antlers of a species they are helping to wipe out. His offence involves the spirit as well the letter and it would be a poor creature who did not cheer Jackie on when he decks Cornish in the hospitality lounge at St James's Park while Ray hides behind a pillar. It's only a gesture, and Ray deserves no such loyalty, but it's satisfying, in an elegiac manner befitting this grave and affectionate book.

Sean O'Brien's selected poems, 'Cousin Coat', are published by Picador