Byron Easy is the debut novel of Jude Cook, co-founder of the now defunct band Flamingos. A nice person at William Heinemann sent me a copy due to his musical past and I thought I’d return the favour by writing a little something about it.
First off, I should say that Byron Easy is not a book about music. There are a few references and lines of songs that the protagonist hears/remembers but other than that it’s a regular literary fiction novel. I don’t want to go into the storyline in any great detail, but I will say that the book is based around the titular character’s recollection of his sorry life, a cash-strapped (poverty stricken may be a better description) failing poet (he’s published one piece at the age of thirty), who’s marriage to a demanding (and sometimes psychotic) wife collapses before ever really existing properly.
One of the thoughts in my head while reading the book (and one of criticisms I picked up from the few reviews I’ve read) is that for all of his self-pity, his problems were solveable if he just avoided certain people and got a steady job. While this observation has it’s truths, I think Cook put in enough small hints that suggest at the other side of a terrible coin – the conveyor belt of a middle-of-the-road life, where monotony and boredom reign supreme. In one part he writes:
In the distance, beyond the glut of jammed car parks and office-space-to-let, there is a cluster of newly built homes advertising their promise of soul death. This is where your life’s journey ends, they seem to proclaim: under the brown-tiled roof, next to the too-new fences, the unspoilt mica-macadam driveways, the fitted bathrooms and kitchens that must annihilate the soul just to enter them.
For me, this shows that for all of Easy’s woes while trying to live the life of an artist, he is still suitably terrified of a painted-by-numbers ‘regular’ life where all the traditions are followed and clichés fulfilled. He isn’t willing to become another faceless member of the population, at least not at first, before it’s too late, and his existential angst throughout the story (while a traditional cliché itself in young to middle-aged men, but that’s another discussion entirely) supports this notion. Yes there are clear answers to his problems but that doesn’t mean these ‘answers’ would be any more bearable than his current predicament.
It is this sort of no-right-answer dilemma that makes Byron Easy an interesting read. The style is impressively both realistic and intelligent, avoiding the usual ‘realism = short words and swearing’ pitfall, and the protagonist is neither especially nice or inherently nasty. He’s both blameless and the root of all his problems. He’s a victim of circumstance and a destroyer of his own luck. He’s part tragedy, part comedy. He’s real.
I’m not going to say any more than that, other than saying it is well worth your time. Cook’s work has been compared to Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, and John Kennedy Toole, and while I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, he is not out of his depth in such company. Byron Easy is available through William Heinemann at all good book stores (and the big online powerhouses). You can read an excerpt and an essay on the book here.
P.S. This may be the first and last book review on Wake the Deaf. Although, if anyone else wants to send me free books then please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Maybe we should start a sister blog (Wake the Blind?) to deal with literary matters? Let us know. And don’t forget the free books.