It is always a huge challenge to write a novel about musicians. There are, after all, enough you-couldn’t-make-this-up real-world tales of rapid success, failure and excess to make most fictional stories pale in comparison.
Still, Laura Barnett makes one of the finest attempts of recent years with her second novel, Greatest Hits, in which her protagonist is a famous folky singer-songwriter in the vein of Sandy Denny or Joan Baez.
Cass Wheeler is in her 60s and describes herself as “ex-musician, ex-mother, ex-daughter, ex-wife”. She decides to try to make sense of her troubled life, both as a very public singer and a very private person, by spending a day listening to her greatest hits – not necessarily her bestsellers, but songs that reflect the sweep of her 60 years.
Through 16 of these songs – with the full lyrics for each printed at the start of each chapter – we dip into critical moments in Wheeler’s life. There are songs about her mother leaving the family home when she was 10, songs that represent packing up for London as a teenager to make music with the raffish Ivor – the conduit through which she will become a star – and songs that reflect on retiring from playing or even listening to music after an immense personal tragedy.
This flashback device, written from the present, means there is a sense of foreboding about the choices she makes, and Barnett is brave in making Wheeler often unlikeable, distant and selfish. Ambition comes at a cost – she can’t stay settled anywhere.
This foreshadowing does tend to dull the moments of true drama, and Greatest Hits also trips a little too easily into cliché – not just in terms of what happens to musicians when they become successful – but also in the idea of children doomed to suffer as a result of the mistakes of their parents and to repeat them, too.
But the way this novel manages to crackle with the vibrancy of a chaotic life means it is easy to forgive Wheeler (and Barnett) for the slight feeling of middle-class navel-gazing that lurks beneath the surface of her protagonist’s lovely farmhouse.
Greatest Hits also comes with a full soundtrack created by singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams, which perfectly matches the image Barnett creates of her star.
For all she might be fictional. Williams – and Barnett – have made Cass Wheeler just about as real as they possibly can.
