"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.