"Rare Singles" by Benjamin Myers

Fifty years ago Bucky cut two records before living the rest of his life in obscurity. Now, newly bereaved, crippled with arthritis and addicted to opioids, he has been invited to leave the US for the first time and travel to Scarborough in England where his four songs have achieved cult status. But he leaves his pills on the plane. Will he be able to battle cold turkey, his pain and his grief to get on stage and sing?

The plot may be stereotypical (aimed straight at Hollywood?) and its inspiration seems to be a blend of Demon Copperhead and Searching for Sugar Man (see below) but the question is whether Ben Myers, a superb author responsible for Cuddy, Pig Iron and The Perfect Golden Circle, can breathe life into it? 

I was disappointed. The key characters all seemed to be exactly as you would expect them. Bucky with his "sweetpea" and his "honey" was a stage American. Dinah's husband and son were predictably awful. The Moslem hotel cleaner had a heart of gold, of course she had. Even the malevolent seagull came straight from central casting. 

Worse, there were several paragraphs of dialogue, mostly involving Dinah, that seemed artificial, designed to provide information rather than to build character. They broke the verisimilitude; I was no longer absorbed in the story but alienated, realising I was a reader and this was a book.

There were some stunning pieces of prose:

• “The whisky tasted of burnt oranges and wet ash, lonely nights and bitter mornings.” (p 106)
• “Voices of doubt grew like stalactites in the dark, dripping caves of his mind.” (p 106)
• “The day had drifted, the morning yawning into afternoon, the afternoon tightening into a cool autumnal evening. Evening glancing towards night.” (p 127)

From most authors, this would have been a decent book but I have come to expect more, much more, from the author who can create the young labourer with the mother dying of cancer in  the final part of Cuddy, John-John in Pig Iron, and the wonderful pair of mavericks in The Perfect Golden Circle. 

Selected quotes:

page references refer to the Bloomsbury hardback edition 2024

• “Down into the rough, cloying quicksand of a second strange sleep.” (p 13)
• “It bombed like Dresden.” (p 22)
• “Dinah knew her love for her son was diminishing ... but she refused to succumb to guilt over this recent realisation, and in fact wondered if love and the capacity to give it had a limit. ... Was there a discernible moment when all the love for someone is gone?” (p 63)
• “Sometimes it seems like the working  life is out to break a man rather than make a man.” (p 85)
• “He had known that this day was coming for years ... What he hadn't expected was that it would be here, wedged between a dreary sea and a low -ceiling sky in a foreign land.” (p 92)
• “The weight of history was pressing him deeper down into the pit of withdrawal. All those memories that he had put into holes and buried. They hadn't disappeared though, merely corroded.” (p 97)
• “Everything that stands against the sea is scrubbed away eventually.” (p 105)
• “Maybell was just better equipped to deal with the day-to-day act of living than he was - and it was an act, because pretending was part of it, always had been. Pretending you were thriving rather than just surviving; pretending you were strong when you felt weak; pretending you didn't give a damn when really you were scared of every shadow; pretending you were happy, you were cool, you were chilling.” (p 132)
• “Rain was indifferent. Rain ruled the world. It amplified his insignificance; it reminded him that just when you think you're at the bottom, there's always further to plummet.” (p 163)
• “Were we simply stagnating like the lonely pond that is no longer being refreshed by rain, and is simply sitting in the sun, losing all its oxygen; all of the life forms that it harbours slowly suffocating, the foetid stench of decay hanging over the unmoving body of browning water.” (p 184)

November 2024; 207 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary film about Sixto Rodriguez, a musician from Detroit who cut two albums in the early 1970s which bombed in the US but achieved cult status in apartheid South Africa. The film rather gives the impression that, following his rediscovery, his comeback tour of South Africa was the first time he had played his music for nearly thirty years; in fact he was also well-known in Australia, where he had concert tours in 1979 and 1981, and New Zealand, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Just as in 'Rare Singles', his work has been sampled by rappers and featured in a movie. In my humble opinion, the intro to 'I Wonder' is one of the great bass guitar riffs.

"Fire Exit" by Morgan Talty

Does our identity depend upon our heritage? And is our heritage passed down to us through 'blood' or 'stories'?

The narrator, Charles, is the stepson of Frederick, a member of the Penobscot nation, an indigenous people living in Maine. Because Charles doesn't qualify as Penobscot he is not allowed to live on the reservation. Instead he lives across the river and spends his days watching his daughter growing up with her mother and another man. Meanwhile his mother, Louise, who has battled episodes of depression throughout her life, is now drifting into dementia.

He wants to tell his now adult daughter that he is her father. “She needed to know that her blood was her blood. nothing could take that away, and nothing could even come close to capturing it.” (Ch 12) He hasn't really grasped the implications: not only does that cast doubt on her identity as Penobscot but also she will discover that her parents have been lying to her all these years. 

It's a nice conundrum. The narrator is obsessed by bloodline and yet many of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in this book are between people with no genetic connections, such as Charles with his beloved stepfather and Bobby with Louise. 

The subplot of his mother's voyage into dementia is a counterpoint that reinforces and strengthens the theme.

I found the first chapter very confusing (even after I discovered I had skipped two pages and returned to reread them). But the structure of the plot is nicely balanced between keeping the reader guessing, letting curiosity drive the page-turning, and providing sufficient information. It ends in a dramatic climax with is both surprising and a necessary consequence of what went before; Aristotle would have approved.

Selected quotes:

• “I knew her only by the conversations we had on the phone, her body the shape of a voice on the other end of the line.” (Ch 3)
• “The only true thing I could be certain about ... was that blood is messy, and it stains in ways that are hard to clean, especially if that stain can't be seen but we know it is there, a trail of red or dark red leading back to a time we cannot go to remove it.” (Ch 6)
• “I wasn't sure Louise knew who I was anymore, but I was quite certain I was nobody. And as I sat there I felt myself slipping away to damp depths of sadness as I had done the night before, and I was thinking and thinking and thinking about how, in just the past year, I had just started to know her, but then I began to unknow her, getting farther and farther away like watching a boat drift from the shore and head out not to some other land but to an open water that never, ever ends. And she did not even know this, that she was on the boat.” (Ch 21)
• “We are made of stories, and if we don't know them - the ones that make us - how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” (Ch 26)

November 2024; 292 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the Hundred best novels since Time began, this debut novel first published in 1961 was a finalist for the National Book Award. It became a three-times Oscar nominated film directed by Sam Mendes and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; I've never seen the film.

It's about how the need to grow up and earn a living destroys our dreams.

It's 1955 in the USA. Frank wants life to be meaningful. April, his wife, married him because he was always talking of things that seemed important and worthwhile. But now he is saddled with “the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs.” (1.2) She is a housewife and mother bringing up two children. They devise a plan to drop out of the rate race and move to Europe where she will work and he will find himself. But events and human weakness conspire to undermine their dreams.

We've all been there. We've all had to compromise on our hopes. This is a universal theme.

Despite being written in the third-person 'omniscient' and past tense, it was almost entirely from the PoV of Frank.

My problem was that I didn't like the characters. Now that should be a sign of excellence in writing: to inspire such a reaction in your reader. But I wasn't sure that I wholly believed in them:

• April was a neurotic doormat. She seemed to live entirely for her man. She seems entirely contented with her role as a domestic servant; her plans for the future revolve around making her man more fulfilled. She says things like: “You always do have the right instinct about things like this. You’re really a very generous, understanding person, Frank.” She belatedly realises this when, finally and of course disastrously, she makes up her mind to rebel. “The only real mistake, the only wrong and dishonest thing, was effort to have seen him as anything more than that. Oh, for a month or two, just for fun, it might be all right to play a game like that with a boy; but all these years! And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear.” (3.7) But in terms of the book this epiphany came too late. I suppose you can argue that their row-strewn marriage was fuelled by her unrealised anger. I suppose you can argue that women in America in 1955 were complacently subservient. But it didn't ring true to me.
• Frank almost completely lacks self-awareness. He's a self-pitying bully and tyrant. He wants to feel that he's a man. In conversation he's a bore. Somehow he has done less than the minimum at work for seven years and kept his job. He can embark upon an affair without any feelings of guilt. Of course you don't need your main character through whose eyes the others are seen to be a hero  but Frank was so unpleasant that, even though he had dreams (although he never really visualised them) and now his life is dull dull dull, I couldn't sympathise. Stop whingeing and get over it was how I felt. 

I am aware that I am judging these characters (a) as if they were real (which suggests that the book was well-written) and (b) in the light of contemporary standards, after we have had nearly seventy years of feminism.

The other characters were very much in the background. Mrs Givings (I kept reading that as 'misgivings') was a nice little cameo role.

The plot was mostly predictable and paced very much as you would expect. 

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• "as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.” (1.2)
• “His temple ached in zeal and triumph as he heaved a rock up from the suck of its white-wormed socket and let it roll end over end down into the shuddering leafmold, because he was a man.” (1.3)
• “His thin gray body, which seemed to have been made for no other purpose than to fill the minimum requirements of a hard-finish, double-breasted business suit.” (2.4)

But if you want trapped suburban American angst, I'd prioritise Rabbit, Run by John Updike and its sequel Rabbit Redux.

There's an interesting homage to The Great Gatsby. Compare these two passages:

• “‘I just remembered that today’s my birthday.’ I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.” (The Great Gatsby, Ch 7)
• “I just thought of something ... Tomorrow’s my birthday. ... I'll be thirty years old.” (Revolutionary Road 1.4)

Is it a coincidence that the protagonist's name is Frank and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's first name was Francis?

Selected quotes:

• “His face did have an unusual mobility: it was able to suggest wholly different personalities with each flickering change of expression.” (1.2)
• “Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ... and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach." (1.2)
• “You want to know why everybody thinks you're a jerk? Because you're a jerk, that's why.” (1.2)
• “It was turning into mindless, unrewarding work, the kind of work that makes you clumsy with fatigue and petulant with lack of progress.” (1.3)
• “Wasn't it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn't really wanted to do?” (1.3)
• “He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.” (1.4)
• “Her hair was as unattractively wild now as it must have been in childhood; it seemed to have exploded upward from her skull into hundreds of little kinks. She touched it delicately with her fingertips in several places, not in any effort to smooth it but rather in the furtive, half-conscious way that he had sometimes touched his pimples at sixteen, just to make sure the horrible things were still there.” (1.6)
• “Don't ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” (3.1)
• “She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known ... that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.” (3.7)
• “The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something.” (3.9)

October 2024; 337 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God