Book reviews: Uncommon People, The Hopkins Conundrum and more

UNCOMMON PEOPLE: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ROCK STARS by David Hepworth (Bantam, £20) 

So for me there is nobody better to reflect on the last huzzah! (as Smash Hits would have said) of the rock biz for those of us who won’t see 40 again. Writer and broadcaster Hepworth has followed 1971: Never A Dull Moment, a comprehensive view of the year he described as “the most febrile and creative time in the history of popular music”, with Uncommon People which focuses on a key day that changed the life of 40 rock stars from 1955 to 1994.

It begins with the day that Little Richard first recorded his salacious songs and ends with Marc Andreessen making a fortune from his Netscape internet browser, leading to most music being available without money changing hands and arguably ending the music business as we knew it. 

Hepworth points out that in 2017 the age of the rock star is over. “Their products now compete on a level playing fi eld with everything from virtual reality games to streaming movies. It’s just another branch of the distraction business, owned by the same multinational conglomerates as the theme parks and the multiplexes.”

And if this sounds a bit “bah, kids today” then that’s fine by me as Hepworth’s celebration of the golden age of rock ’n’ roll will strike an emotive chord with those of us whose best times have been spent in the company of black vinyl or a live band, minus people filming on a mobile phone.

The research in Uncommon People is fantastic and its fascinating detail will entertain even those who think they’ve read it all before. The section on Buddy Holly’s death pictures his last tour which was more like a death march than a series of gigs:

“When the buses broke down… the huddled occupants burned newspapers in the aisles to keep warm.” The chapter on Elvis’s death notes that the King’s people at Graceland would vet his girlfriends before they entered.

“Anyone with dirty fi ngernails or opinions of their own would not proceed far beyond the ground floor.” There are also minor tragedies such as the day when Ian Stewart was ejected from the Rolling Stones for being too ugly.

Uncommon People could so easily be an “it wasn’t like that in my day” grumble over 300-odd pages but Hepworth’s knowledge and enthusiasm for music makes it a hugely enjoyable and informative refl ection on the days when rock ruled the world.

The best compliment I can give it is that it feels like one of those evenings when you sit with your friends and talk about the music you love. Uncommon People leaves you with the same companionable glow.

CLAIR WOODWARD

Well versed in the art of getting merry

THE HOPKINS CONUNDRUM by Simon Edge Lightning Books, £8.99

MUCH as I detest the abbreviation LOL, I think there is a case for bookshops devoting sections to books that make you laugh out loud (LOL). Feeling a bit glum? Then allow the assistant to direct you to the LOL section, just beyond Languages but before Opera. Simon Edge’s fi rst novel The Hopkins Conundrum would defi nitely warrant a place on these merry shelves.

His central character Tim Cleverley is a wonderfully hapless male, a direct descendant of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or some of those likeable but largely useless blokes in a Malcolm Bradbury or a David Lodge novel.

Tim has bought a pub in rural Wales. Much as he loves it, he quickly observes it is mostly empty. Being a child of the PR era he hits upon the idea of promoting his new gaff by drawing on the fact it is near the place where the somewhat diffi cult and obscure Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once lived. Tim is not a poetry lover himself. 

“It would have to be a cold day in hell before he would voluntarily pick up a volume of verse to entertain himself,” we are told. But needs must so why not enlist the help of a Dan Brown-type writer with Da Vinci Code credibility to conjure up a Holy Grail-esque mystery connected with Hopkins and the pub?

Surely gullible punters will pour in. Tim’s artful wheeze is both helped and hindered by the presence of Chloe, the new love of his life who is a genuine Hopkins nut and mistakenly believes Tim is an afi cionado. Alongside this modern comedy, Gerard Manley Hopkins himself takes us back to an event in 1875 which became the subject matter for possibly his greatest and most fiendishly diffi cult poem The Wreck Of The Deutschland.

The Deutschland, a ship bound for New York, ran aground in the Thames Estuary resulting in many deaths, including that of fi ve nuns whose awful fate is described in this novel. The novel seesaws between comedy and calamity, present and past. It pokes fun at pretension but also gives an insight into why a Catholic poet such as Hopkins – so weird, so spiritual and so intense – deserves his claim to greatness. The result is a novel enjoyable on every level.

VERDICT: 4/5

JENNIFER SELWAY

Dramatic retelling of a thrilling Greek tragedy

HOUSE OF NAMES by Colm Tóibín Viking, £14.99

COLM Tóibín’s stunning new work House Of Names marks a dramatic departure for the Irish novelist. Set in ancient Greece it is a retelling of the violent story of Clytemnestra, the mythical queen who murdered her husband King Agamemnon in revenge for his sacrifice of their daughter. She is later murdered by her son Orestes, avenging his father’s death.

Tóibín is perhaps best known for realist novels detailing small-town Irish life, from his imaginative depiction of emigrant life in the bestselling Brooklyn or for The Master which reimagined the later years of writer Henry James.

House Of Names is an altogether bloodier affair. The tale will be familiar to readers of the classics but Tóibín brings his razor-sharp prose and unique literary sensibilities to this ancient story of revenge and internecine familial conflict.

The novel opens with a first-person narrative by Clytemnestra who is “acquainted with the smell of death”.

She has just conspired with her paramour Aegisthus to murder her husband and his lover, a long-awaited reprisal for Agamemnon offering their eldest daughter Iphigenia’s life to the goddess Artemis for a favourable wind for his fleet and victory in the Trojan War. Agamemnon won the war but his “doom was set in stone” as soon as he chose military glory over the life of his child.

As Clytemnestra recounts the harrowing events that led to her daughter’s death at the hands of her “cowardly, two-tongued father”, she now exists in a moral world in which vengeance is her only raison d’être, having lost her faith in the gods: “Among the gods now there is no one who offers me assistance or oversees my actions or knows my mind.

There is no one among the gods to whom I appeal. I live alone in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed.” After Agamemnon’s death Clytemnestra leads a coup, taking control of the city with the help of Aegisthus.

The wily Aegisthus has had her young son kidnapped and the narrative shifts to a third-person account of Orestes being spirited away. Orestes escapes in the company of two other hostages and spends fi ve years at a remote seaside farm belonging to an anonymous old woman.

He gradually grows into manhood, all the while knowing that a day would come “when something would be decided” and he would have to dutifully confront the bloody fallout from his father’s killing. Tóibín skilfully switches from a wistful description of Orestes’ life in exile to the vengeful voice of his surviving sister Electra as events move inexorably towards Clytemnestra’s reckoning with her son and his filial duty.

In a novel describing one of the Western world’s oldest legends, in which the gods are conspicuous by their absence, Tóibín achieves a paradoxical richness of characterisation and a humanisation of the mythological, marking House Of Names as the superbly realised work of an author at the top of his game.

VERDICT: 5/5

HUSTON GILMORE