Burns also worked with Peter Whitehead, writing Jeanette Cochrane, a short experimental film in a montage style, which featured early music from Pink Floyd and an appearance by Nico.
Largely autobiographical, it recounts a middle-class childhood spent during the Second World War and an adolescence and young adulthood in its aftermath.
Burns's brother and mother both died during the war, and the novel deals with the consequences of their deaths for the remaining family members.
With his second novel, Europe After the Rain, titled after the Max Ernst painting, Burns begins to use collage techniques and cut-ups.
Celebrations transposes the techniques of Europe After the Rain into the workplace, where the violence persists, but is more concealed, occluded by family hierarchies and arcane legal structures.
In the novel the Kennedys become mythical figures, but incredibly wealth and influence cannot shield them from an essentially tragic character, and as the various members die, it's possible to see Burns replicating his own family pattern.
Alongside these personal and theoretical changes, the group of experimental writers that had formed in London in the mid sixties had lost much of its impetus following the suicides of Ann Quin and B.S.
Toward the conclusion of the novel Norah and her large family (she has five children with five different partners) are confined to what Burns describes as "factory, hospital and work-camp [combined] into an all purpose institution to represent the power of the State", a particularly Thatcherite institution in which the workplace, the prison, the hospital and the school combine, and here in particular Burns seems to anticipate the sweatshops and maquiladoras that arrive with emerging globalisation.
In 1982 he co-edited (with Charles Sugnet) The Imagination on Trial: British and American writers discuss their working methods, which The Washington Post "Book World" called "diverting, iconoclastic, and compulsively readable".
Revolutions of the Night was a return to a lighter prose style, and in places its short, gnomic utterances recall his work in Celebrations.
Again the title is taken from a Max Ernst painting, and the focus is a wealthy, middle-class family in which one member, on this occasion the mother, dies early on, and the remainder of the novel is focussed on the fallout from her death.