Book review: In present-day Chicago, septuagenarian Earlon “Bucky” Bronco, a former soul singer, is struggling to get by. Childless and recently widowed after a 50-year marriage to his beloved Maybelline, he’s feeling bereft, as if he’s “slowly fading from view”. He’s also addicted to opioids to retain his mobility, the pain he suffers in his hips a “constant blaze that burnt to the core of his bones”.
He has received an unexpected invitation to perform songs he hasn’t sung in half a century at a Northern soul weekend in Scarborough, a seaside town in North Yorkshire. Despite his physical impairment, and having never travelled outside the US, Bucky accepts the invitation.
He doesn’t realise that Northern soul, heavily influenced by Detroit’s Motown sound, was popular in the 1960s and 70s in the UK, when the music was played in dance clubs throughout northern England and the Midlands.
In 1967, aged 17, Bucky cut two soul singles, only one of which, Until the Wheels Fall Off, was released. A year later, on a visit to Detroit with his brother Sess to hear their idol James Brown perform, they were assaulted by “some greasy knuckleheads”. Sess was convicted of first-degree murder for killing one of his attackers. Bucky served 18 months on remand in juvenile detention. He and his songs sank into oblivion, his dreams were shattered, and he never sang again.
For nostalgic British superfans like Dinah, the novel’s second point-of-view character who becomes Bucky’s minder in Scarborough, the appeal of the Northern soul sound has never waned. In fact, it’s the only aspect of her life that brings her joy.
At their first meeting in Scarborough, Dinah sees “a big old man with a limp that he disguised as an easy-going rolling shamble, and mournful eyes”. Bucky sees a woman 20 years younger than him who “had lived some … But she had not been worn down by life. He could see a strength to her”.
Bucky is stunned to learn that in England his first and only released single has become a legend among Northern soul fans he never knew he had. A German music journalist interviews him, informing an incredulous Bucky that he’s about to become “the soul comeback of the century”.
When he realises to his horror that he’s left his crucial pain medication on the plane, Bucky is plunged into a sudden, nightmarish opiate withdrawal. Myers’ depiction of Bucky’s inner life and his crash-landing is masterful.
With Bucky and Dinah, Myers has created two sympathetic characters, both lost souls, who forge an unexpected alliance. Dinah is fed up with her marriage to Russell, a feckless, work-shy, alcoholic man-child. And she has likewise given up on her loser son Lee, one of those “unemployed, under-qualified 20-something stoners with porn addictions who still lived with their parents”.
The author is a former music journalist and his background knowledge and passion for the subject imbues Rare Singles with a compelling authenticity. In the novel’s last chapter, Myers viscerally evokes the dance club atmosphere, the night alive with possibilities, patrons feeling sozzled and high, with “slurred voices, slopped drinks and illicit smoke”.
Myers’ previous novel, Cuddy, won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize. With Rare Singles, his 10th work of fiction, Myers has delivered a novel with a big heart and a generous dollop of soul.
Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, $37).
