KEY POINTS:
It was all looking good for the revolution against The Man and war and everything uncool in late 1967.
The music had never been so good, the love so free, the drugs so freaky. It was the summer of love, dude, and what could possibly go wrong?
Trouble was, it was all premised in a rejection of everything that made straight society so uptight, most notably a strict, strait-laced moral code.
And while it seemed all very well tossing out the uncool commandments about not taking lots of drugs and screwing whoever, the flipside was that there was nothing much stopping other people tinkering with another, darker kind of buzz.
This strange and intense novel is set in that stream of the heady convection stirring Britain and America in the late 1960s.
It drops us right in it, with a man named Charlie taking a man named Bobby off for a drive and encouraging him to join him in breaking into a suburban house in the outskirts of Los Angeles to await the return of the comfortable, middle-class owners with a length of extension cord and a balled-up stocking on the table, and a silver pistol in Charlie's hand.
Charlie is Charles Manson. Bobby is Bobby Beausoleil. The names sent real-life shivers down historical spines throughout America and across the world in the early 1970s, when the pair - along with a half-dozen others, mostly young women - were arrested and charged with a series of incredibly brutal murders committed in 1969.
They were all hippies, products and emblems of the counterculture: they seemed to epitomise the violence underpinning the "make love not war" era - carpet-bombing, napalm and summary execution in Vietnam; the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr and the Kennedy brothers at home in America.
Much was made of the links between the music of the day (Manson's term for his murderous spree, helter-skelter, came from a Beatles song, and so did some of the slogans painted in the blood of the victims on the walls at the scenes) as the Establishment sought to discredit the counterculture.
This book explores that notion, pointing the finger at a strand of evil in the collective consciousness.
The other principal characters are a gay, avant-garde film-maker named Kenneth Anger, and the three original front-of-house members of the Rolling Stones: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones.
They are all drawn together in one of Anger's films, An Invocation of My Demon Brother, which includes a scene where a series of superimpositions makes it seem as though Anger's, Jagger's and Beausoleil's faces are morphing into each other.
The novel covers the cardinal episode of the 1960s, the Manson murders, by tracing the emergence of a strand of "thanatomania" - a pathological fixation with death and dying - in the music of the Rolling Stones, simultaneous with Anger's own exploration of the occult, his brief relationship with Beausoleil, the beginnings of "helter-skelter", and the fatal decline into abject drug dependency of Stones guitarist, Brian Jones.
With the exception of Jones, each of the characters is alive and more or less kicking today (although Anger has prostate cancer and predicts his own death on Halloween this year, Manson and Beausoleil are locked up and we all know how wrinkly the Stones are).
It's a bold - and, so far as I know, unprecedented - move to create a historical novel out of the lives of those still living. That's part of what makes it extraordinary.
The other part is the vivid, almost luminous prose, dark as Anger and strutting and arrogant as Jagger ever was on stage.
Sway, Zachary Lazar
(Jonathan Cape $34.99)
* John McCrystal is a Wellington reviewer.
