Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers

I just finished reading Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers (published on 1st August) and felt compelled to write about it. Initially this was just going to be a note, but the more I thought about it, the more I had to say.

Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco is a man living with despair. A year after the death of his wife he has found increasing consolation in the opioids that he was taking for the pain of busted hips he can’t afford to have replaced and which work equally well on other, more pressing pain. He is a man drifting away from reality, barely alive in a city that has long forgotten him and increasingly out of touch with the rhythms of modern America. Ironically, the only thing he does understand is its love affair with prescription opioids. He’s not the only one running away from pain.

When he is contacted about taking part in a Northern Soul weekender in the British seaside town of Scarborough, he thinks it’s probably just part of the ongoing fever dream of his life. Nobody at home knows that Bucky had a short lived career as a soul singer back in the day, bookended as it was by violence, prison and death, but the people of Scarborough do, and they want him to come and sing for them. With nothing to lose, Bucky boards a plane and for the first time in his life, leaves America where he will spend the strangest weekend of his life.

Myers has created a mash up of a Jack Kerouac Beat novel with a play by Alan Bennett or possibly (thanks to the Scarborough connection) Alan Ayckbourn, and it’s genius. The lone man, pushing against the vast, unfeeling monolith of American geography wanders by accident into a grimly fading British seaside town where human history compacts like the cliffs and everyone knows your business. The wilderness is still here, but it’s the sea, nibbling at the shoreline inch by painful inch, rather than the deserts and wide open spaces of America. The road that guides the wanderer through the desert is replaced by the bleakness of the beach on which intrepid swimmers hurl themselves into the cold waves day after day.

Bucky is befriended by Dinah, a woman for whom Northern Soul is a lifeline and Bucky the North Star by which she navigates a life of dull, daily disappointments and repetition that sours into resentment. What happens when Dinah’s tenacity and bloody minded bravery crashes into Bucky’s nihilism and naïveté make for a beautifully bleak, funny and ultimately redemptive novel.

Friendship and its power to save us is something that Myers excels at writing about. His novel, The Perfect Golden Circle also deals with friendship. Set over the blisteringly hot summer of 1989, two men embark on a quest to create a series of mysterious crop circles and baffle the nation. Calvert is a veteran of the Falklands War, damaged by trauma and haunted by his past. Redbone is a chancer, a dreamer, unfit for modern life and taking refuge in drugs and deranged but compelling conspiracies. Their unlikely friendship and their nocturnal escapades give this novel a wild, hallucinatory quality that I absolutely loved.

At heart, both novels are about the power of friendship to redeem and even save your life. Myers plays on the edge of reality, dipping into failure, despair and sorrow and coming up with fistfuls of gold that never fail to surprise and move you in their strange beauty.