The Commitments and the art of musical fiction

One of the reasons our blog, Rave On!, is here is to talk about musical fiction—help define what it is and push other musical novels to readers who will appreciate them.

I was intrigued by the comment of John Niven (author of Music from Big Pink; see previous post): "Grab a pencil and draw up a list of novels featuring an invented rock group that have really worked. Done? You should have a piece of paper with Roddy Doyle's The Commitments written on it." See comments here.

Well, we here at Coral Press disagree; and clearly, we believe, Niven hasn't read any of our books (and we hope that'll change).

But what got me going was that I hadn't read The Commitments yet, though I'd seen and enjoyed the fine Alan Parker movie when it came out in 1991. So I finally picked up a copy of the novel, the first American edition from Vintage Contemporaries. (Interestingly, the first edition of The Commitments was self-published in Dublin in 1987—then as now, the book industry doesn't get musical fiction, at least until they have to. And a quick visit to ABE shows that those first, self-printed editions now go for well over a thousand dollars each.)

What an interesting novel. His style, somewhat telegraphic, reminds me of a great musical fiction short story, Eudora Welty's "Powerhouse," in which the rhythm of the prose captures much of the rhythm of the music; and of course The Commitments is great as it captures (helps invent?) Northern Soul—that fascination with soul music that's brought countless unremarked '60s soul 45s to the attention of ... well, at least obsessed collectors. (Missed the recent Northern Soul convention at a hotel in New Jersey, but I'm sure a fine time was had by all.)

So how does The Commitments stack up as musical fiction? And what does it tell us about the genre? One obvious thing of great interest was Doyle's type choices: the use of bold type spilling down the page to get the feel of the music across. I'm not sure it always worked; also not sure that, since he was dealing with known soul songs, that printing the lyrics more simply might not have let the songs themselves play in our heads.

But that's one of the dilemmas of musical fiction: getting the music, no more than words on a page, to play in the reader's own head. With our Coral Press books this is especially a problem, since we're dealing with invented songs that the reader has never before heard. But we believe that if the context of the song's playing or performance, as well as the way the song's received, are vivid enough, the music will come through.

The Commitments is certainly a simple enough story: a group of somewhat musicians comes together in Dublin, plays a few shows, then falls apart. Anything more narratively would probably be overkill. Another thing the book does so well is that we often only catch what's really going on through the flicker of our eyes; it's in a word choice, an aside, a beat of silence that the book reveals its true meanings and secrets. Admirable restraint on Doyle's part.

But then the scope of The Commitments remains somewhat restrained; and the book itself, though a brilliant little tale, never quite blows up into something larger. A neat trick, if you will, rather than a wide-open, blossoming novel.

Talking about this book also brings up a good occasion to mention the Bomp Bookshelf's compilation of musical novels. The list was personally kept up by Bomp Records founder Greg Shaw (a true friend of Coral Press), and unfortunately it's been frozen after his untimely death in 2005. Nonetheless, a reader searching for a good list of Rock 'n' Roll fiction should start there. Another list, this one using a larger definition of musical fiction, is kept by John R. Gibbs here.

We hope you'll let us know some of you favorite musical novels. Feel free to post comments here or email us at editor@coralpress.com.

First Blog Post

I’ve set up this Coral Press blog because as much as I love to listen to music, I also love to read about it. I plop down the $8.99 each month for the new Mojo magazine, grab new books on the blues or the Beatles when they’re released, take pride in knowing the stories behind the music I listen to.

I also love to write about music, and because I’ve always written fiction, I’ve found the writing I do about music is in made-up stories and novels.

Thus came Coral Press, not only to get musical novels into print but also to provide a forum for the whole idea of musical fiction -- and now we’re starting this blog to give our readers a place to move discussion, note new musical fictions, and further the whole notion that you can tell a story as good and powerful as real life in a novel.

What specifically made me set this blog up was reading Music from Big Pink, a musical novel by John Niven that’s part of the excellent Continuum Press 33 1/3 series of book on single LPs. As you probably know, the books in the 33 1/3 are examinations of one album, creatively written, for sure, but for the most part a long essay about how the record was made and the effects on everyone it has had.

But with Music from Big Pink, Niven wrote a fiction—a first person narration by a young drug dealer hanging around Woodstock as the Band was putting together its first, great LP. There can—and should—be debate as to how good a novel Music from Big Pink is (The New York Times Book Review quite liked it), but that it succeeds in colorfully and powerfully evoking the world around The Band circa 1967, the tensions in the group, and the both willful and haphazard creation of a masterwork can’t be denied. The Music from Big Pink story is well told through an invented character and his story.

More and more there are musical fictions out there, and more and more they’re getting attention and appropriate regard. We’ll talk more here about musical fictions as they appear; we’ll also feel comfortable discussing movies and TV that are also musical fictions (a flick such as Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous is a perfect example of how telling a good musical story in a made-up way can lead to powerful art; the somewhat lamented recent TV show Love Monkey shows another way storytelling can get into the music biz, if not the music itself).

One of our stated goals with starting Coral Press is to turn musical fiction into an accepted genre. As our joke goes, we’re after the reader who says, “Boy, I’ve read those mysteries and romance novels, and by now they’re all the same. What I really need is a good new Musical Novel!”

These readers are out there. All you need is a love of music and a love of reading about it and a love of hearing a good story with strong characters and powerful lots and ... well, all that makes any novel great.

And that’s what we here at Coral Press, especially here in our new blog, hope to push: Books that tell musical stories in a musical way, that let you capture all the joy and sadness—and more—of the music itself as you read.