ANT012 - Music as fiction
The curious relationship literature has to music and the novels that exist within the fuzzy gap between them
“Music: what so many sentences aspire to be,” wrote the late poet Mary Oliver.
I have often felt that music is the ultimate fiction. For both creator and consumer, it does more than transport you, it becomes you. At its best, you are not merely observing, feeling, or looking through someone else, you are someone else. The right track is a new-found confidence, a depth never before felt, a brightness in the gloom of winter.
Biggie doesn’t just show us his playful confidence, he imbues it upon us. Bob Marley gifts us his appreciation of life. The Gallagher brothers their swagger. Mac Miller his bittersweet early wisdom. Kano his heart. Nina Simone her soul. Miles Davis his blues and Billie Holiday her pain. Dance music, the right kind and in the right place, gives you the universe - a space outside of the confines of your body and the physical barriers between you, other people and the world.
It has a fuzzy, indefinable relationship to literature - siblings so alike that they can’t quite understand one another. They occupy the same space and yet pick up where the other has left off, music expressing that which can’t be put into words and literature providing the nuance that can only be. It’s no wonder that so many novels reference music - often used to set a scene or say something about a character that only their relationship to music or popular culture can - but that so few writers seem to tackle the subject head on. Despite the wealth of quotes showing the appreciation literary greats have for music, it seems to be shied away from as a subject. Impossible to do justice to, perhaps.
Luckily for us, some have taken on that impossible task. Writing from within music and nightlife scenes, hero-ing musicians as main characters, embodying drum and bass obsessed teenagers or even writing prose in the style of music or that aims to be music, this issue is about the books that blend the two seamlessly.
“Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.”
Alphonse de Lamartine
Written in tiny, fragmented passages that jump scattily between locations, characters and time, Rainald Goetz’s Rave (1998) comes across as live notes from the debauchery of Munich’s Techno scene. Through a very present narrator, the novel itself alludes to the goal of writing in a style that embodies the music, something Goetz has come close to achieving. Eschewing the constraints of plot, it instead captures a feeling and an atmosphere that readers must give themselves to so that it washes over you, an opaqueness punctuated by moments of clarity to echo a life of blurred nights - existential questioning included. Characterised by its abstract experimentalism, it’s challenging in many ways and will no doubt be polarising. I loved it.
The distant, thick-gracious bass-boom-beat, which says: Now we’ve finally got it. And at this moment with every new beat and heartbeat, with every breath drawn into the lungs, with every breath-yes and breath-no, with every pulse and palpitation of the eyelids and with every next step and the one following, exploding all at once like in high-speed slo-mo, the pill took hold with stunning force.
Rainald Goetz - Rave
The latest in Max Porter’s repertoire, Shy (2023) tells the story of its namesake - a troubled, drum & bass obsessed teenager in a juvenile delinquent facility. Told in grubby prose as if from his nicotine stained fingers, it is a murky dive into his mind and the insecurities, inner turmoil and guilt that make him lash out at the world. As always, Porter’s compassion and understanding of his subject shine through. Throughout, an obsession with beats, tape-packs, MCs and the eternal classic track debates rattle through it as his only escape.
He can hear it, precisely, in his head, the way an Amen break washes like a wave, slots inside itself again and again, fits inside his heart, his favourite thing when it drops down to half speed, slouching, swagger, weapons close to its chest, and then it jumps up, exploding crisp and juicy […] Obviously he never says any of this to Shaun, or Benny, he just says Hardcore. Nice. Yeah. F**king love this tune.
Max Porter - Shy
I mentioned Iain Banks in ANT011, but can’t resist dropping him in here again. This time: Espedair Street (1987). Contemplating his life, Daniel Weir (or Weird), looks back on his rise to fame and riches as the bassist in a rock band and his subsequent fall from grace - now a recluse in a Victorian folly living a down and out life that, given the money in his bank, feels as false as his successes. A thoroughly entertaining (fictional) biopic of rock-music stardom and its dangers, it evolves from gritty and cynical to a layered, witty, heartwarming tale.
A sort of ecstasy, all right; a charging, pulsing sense of shared joy; a bodily delight felt as much in the brain as in the guts and skin and the beating heart. Ah, to go on and on like that, you thought; to be at that level forever ... Well, it was impossible, of course.
Iain Banks - Espedair Street
Toni Morrisons’s Jazz (1992) is named so not for any relation music has to the plot - it tells the story of a married couple in Harlem after the husband has an affair with an eighteen year old girl. Instead, the structure and style of the writing mimics Jazz music - its conversational nature, full of shifts in pace and rhythm, different narrators weaving amongst each other as a musical ensemble. With the lyrical tone and poised insight of all Morrison’s work, there is an intensity and authority here as melancholy blues build to raging rhythm.
I'm crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.
Toni Morrison - Jazz
Bonus: I’m currently reading former Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac’s The Mess We’re In, which almost made it here. I felt it doesn’t quite live up to the quality or originality of the others but it’s enjoyable all the same and full of heart. She packs in so many musical references that it becomes a guide to modern music squeezed into a novel. Worthwhile if you’re after a lighter read.
I try to stop grinning, to fix my face to look more casual at this scene – this pub in Camden, this band that I live with now – as if this is just a typical evening for me instead of the first night out of the rest of my life. Then the barman catches my eye. I lean forwards. I am a Londoner now. I’m a voice in the noise. I’m ready.
Annie Mac - The Mess We’re In
Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (2020) isn’t about music as such. It’s about friendship, male fragility, morality, and, ultimately, mortality. But music’s influence through it is inescapable, forming the texture of the world and the obsessions of the characters. It is about the kind of friendships music inspires, the hedonistic combination of mindless fun and philosophical significance that the pursuit of it seems to create and how this hums through the rest of our lives. The rosy glow of existence in the final years of youth that forever define the music dear to us - years where the fun comes to a head, charged by the instinctual knowledge that everything might be the last time - even if we only come to realise this much later.
Morrissey came brandishing a licence, a whole manner of permission, as if a new kind of belonging could be made from feeling left out, like nobody knew you as he did […] every word and every guitar lick felt like a statement only they could make, and only we could hear, those songs rolling from the stage to irrigate our lives.
The first half of the book, set in Thatcher’s Britain, introduces a group of Scottish lads obsessed with the distinctly British brand of post-punk music that dominated the early eighties. They plan a trip, a pilgrimage really, to the G-Mex centre in Manchester for the festival of the Tenth Summer. The Fall, New Order, The Smiths and The Hacienda dominate their thoughts. The group are centered around twenty-year-old Tully Dawson, the wise-cracking ring leader, and Jimmy, the thoughtful narrator who is taken in by Tully’s family after cutting ties with his parents. It is a funny, musical romp, their witty chat captured in ping-pong dialogue. O’Hagan perfectly captures the thrill of the journey but also the distinct blend of monumental importance and complete pointlessness intertwined in times like this.
What we had that day was our story. We didn’t have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of all this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I’m sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.
Then a seismic shift to the present: 2017. All grown up. They are still the closest friends, but in a brotherly way - a specific type of deep friendship that needs little maintenance. A caravan by the sea is their shared escape. After Tully calls out of the blue with the worst news - terminal Cancer - he asks something of Jimmy, now James, that will test their friendship to the limit. To help him die. This latter half is tear-jerkingly sad, all the more so for the stoicism in Tully’s continual quips and refusal to be beaten down.
It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step. Then it leaves you. Or does it? Saturday night changes and your body forgets the old compliance. You're not part of it any more and your feet hesitate and your arms stay close to your sides. It's there somewhere, the easy rhythm from other rooms and other occasions, and you're half convinced it will soon come back. It's not the moves – the moves are there – but your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo.
The strength of Mayflies is not just its tackling of mortality and the questions around loyalty and right to choice it asks of us, but the realism of the characters within it. The first half makes you believe them, like them and root for them, somehow making even their drunken, stag-do-esque antics seem tender. This means the latter half can truly take you on their agonising journey. Not just the main characters, but the wives caught up in it all and the other lads of the group, grown in their different directions. O’Hagan’s enviable ability to write so accurately and movingly of both youth and middle age makes it easy to put yourself anywhere in this story and feel its joys and pains.
“Roll me on,” he said. He turned to us, all portly. “Onto the stage. Roll me.” Martyr for tunes, vampire for drink, Lincoln McCafferty crossed his arms over his chest and we rolled him towards the guitarist's fashionably buckled legs. In the universe of small humiliations, there can surely be few more effective for the guitar hero than the arrival at his feet of a rotund little Scottish guy high on Taboo. The guitarist, disturbed mid-song, shuffled and kicked as Limbo gripped on to his legs. I say gripped, I mean hugged, Limbo nodding in time to the music and gnawing the guy's jeans.
There is something about sad books that can deliver an unusual happiness - an affirmation of life and humanity, wonder in the ability of something conjured from someone else’s mind and written down on a page to really make us feel, a human connection sprung from the words. For all of its sadness, O’Hagan’s unapologetic sentimentality - a trait often thought of as undesirable in writers - is a redeeming quality. It isn’t outwardly portrayed through the characters, but a clipped, raw emotion lives just behind everything, pitched to perfection. It is in many ways about sentimentality. It is warm, beautiful and rings of truth.
The BBC adaptation is worth a watch as well. After the book, always after the book.
“We end up talking pish, when in my head it’s all life stuff and crushed hearts.”
Andrew O’Hagan - Mayflies
An enlightening, inspiring interview with legendary music producer Rick Rubin by Krista Tippett. Covering creativity, fatherhood, philosophy, writing and so much more.
It [music] seems to have a really therapeutic effect. I think we all want to be heard and music is a way to let out our inner emotional life, sometimes in a way that can’t necessarily be understood any other way. It functions different than prose or storytelling in that the music has an emotional base to it, even without the words. So you can feel this energy and express whatever’s going on inside of you through this form.
An immersive piece of long form journalism focusing on the death of a boy called Zac, a London kid caught up in the city’s underworld.
After Zac Brettler mysteriously plummeted into the Thames, his grieving parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son. Would the police help them solve the puzzle of his death?
Enigmatic Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who it’s worth noting once owned a Jazz bar and uses music as texture in almost all his surreal tales, with a piece that is on the surface about becoming a runner, but really about most of his life.
At any rate, this is how I started running. Thirty-three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that F. Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. It’s an age that may be a kind of crossroads in life. It was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.
Despite enjoying Alfa Mist’s three albums since, I keep coming back to his 2019 released Structuralism. A leading musical voice in the recent renaissance of Jazz music in London - infused with a gritty twist and Hip Hop influences for a full circle back to roots - his sound has a J Dilla quality but is never-the-less uniquely his. Swinging from mellow to challenging and back again, he wraps up something transcendental in soothing tones.
A lot have left me, like forgotten memories
I tried to save a few, at the cost of many
You died, that's as big a shock as any
Suddenly the burden that I′m liftin′ not as heavyAlfa Mist - Glad I Lived
I hope you’re enjoying the Easter weekend! I’m publishing this from North Wales on the first camping and climbing trip of the year. Despite the lingering early morning cold, summer is around the corner. As always, I really appreciate anyone who shares A Novel Tribe with others. Simply forward this email or link them to the website.
Until next time,
MQ.