May 2021: The Searchers

Books read this month: Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World (Billy Bragg, Faber & Faber, 2017); Highway Blue (Ailsa McFarlane, Harvill Seeker/Hogarth Press, 2021).

People searching for something are always interesting to follow. They could know exactly what they want or they might not have a clue and just be trying to escape the interminable bullshit we all put ourselves through, but whatever it is that's eating at them and driving them to hit the road, is always an intangible that makes for great reading. Literature is littered with great characters on the move and dancing to the tune of their obsessions... and there's a reason why.

Billy Bragg is a restless soul, but it's never led him by the nose. Bragg is an artist who it's fairly safe to say will never jump off the cliff... but he has always peered over the edge and reported on what's below. "You can only write what you see," Woody Guthrie said and the Bard of Barking has lived up to that throughout his artistic life. Bragg's reportage has always had a literary bent to match his knack for a beautiful melody, but it's in his prose writing and books that he has found a voice that fits all. Less Marmite, more Marx perhaps, but Bragg's writings inform, entertain and speculate on the things that interest him. His first book, 'The Progressive Patriot', was ahead of its time (pre-Brexit) in examining what it might mean to be 'British' and 'a Patriot' in a modern 21st century multi-cultural society.

Ken Colyer was similar. The tastemaker of UK jazz in the fifties, Bragg's 'Roots, Radicals & Rockers' examines his early role in music's move to the mainstream and how that shift held sway in the fascinating invisible republics of the first teenagers, skiffle, trad jazz and the people powering the popularity of rock 'n' roll in the UK and beyond. The book's subtitle, 'How Skiffle Changed The World', is an important component of how the author covers the contexts of which these massive cultural shifts occurred. Full of fascinating left-turns, ruthless research, musical knowledge, perceptive primary sources and illuminating hypothesis, Bragg's writing style is conversational and as welcoming as a chat with an old friend in the corner of your local. Sure, music is obviously at the centre of the tale being told, but it frames the book's wider look at developments in post-war Britian's teenage, political, cultural and day-to-day life. A reference book? Possibly, but it's one where history comes to life and light is shone in dusty corners and long-forgotten boxes of treasure. Before The Beatles is something to be...

Lost can also be something to be. Especially in 2021, when retro rules and we're all looking for a world that doesn't look like the one we see each time we open our eyes, front door or favourite social media app. The hazy filter that frames the photograph adorning the cover of Ailsa McFarlane's debut novel (An Observer '10 BEST DEBUTS OF 2021' book) aches with 'right now'. The acclaimed aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino's latest, 'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood', shares a space with the feeling the first few pages this acclaimed new novel leaves you with. Just like that film meanders melodically from scene to scene, so to does the neat narrative of 'Highway Blue'. In truth, though, the book leaves too much space between its journey and the destination the reader is asked to alight at. If you like to read about open spaces across America in the work of, say, Willy Vlautin or Nickolas Butler, then this dreamlike road trip will tick all the right boxes initially, but lacks the depth required to stay with you forever.

The story is as old as the hills you sense are closing in around our hero Anne Marie, but it manages to find new sights and sounds within the music McFarlane's descriptive writing makes with her reportage on the inner lives of the characters. Those inner lives are vital to this confident debut, but in order for a story so still to resonate, a ripple is occasionally required. The slightly surreal and dreamlike state we stay in throughout negates the need for urgency, but as Anne Marie stands behind bars (both real and metaphorical), walks dogs and reckons with the re-emergence of the man she married so young, the story stands still too often. More of a mood piece or novella, 'Highway Blue' is a psychological coming of age that requires as much of you as you might require of it. Read it in one sitting with a bottle of American beer and the soundtrack to 'Paris, Texas' stirring quietly in your ears.

I hope your searches are coming up trumps in the reading department. Speak soon, Al x