Surely you’ve heard of Elijah Page? A voice from the past, yes, but a voice you remember: he played guitar and stood up alone to sing about injustice and heartbreak in the days when it still seemed possible to change the world. Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger, Page – performing in clubs and at festivals, for audiences that took those voices to heart, that shaped their lives according to the songs they heard.
In reality, you are unlikely to have heard of Elijah (or Eli) Page, because W B Belcher invented him for his debut novel – but Page is a pretty convincing concoction. A compelling performer in his day, he vanished from the scene and, it seems, disappeared completely, as the narrator, Jack Wyeth, relates. Wyeth is a Page-obsessed folkie, a millennial with father issues (his guitar-playing dad left when he was five) who drops girlfriends and dead-end jobs like so much change from his pocket, never able to settle, never knowing what he wants.
One day, out of the blue, he gets a call from Eli Page’s manager. Page is ready to write a memoir; all he needs is a ghostwriter. Wyeth takes the job and goes to upstate New York but when he gets there he discovers, perhaps unsurprisingly, that his task is not as straightforward as he’d hoped.
The American folk scene offers a good canvas for the shattering of youthful illusions. It is hard to avoid comparing this novel to the Coen brothers’ haunting 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis , in which Oscar Isaac plays a 1960s folk musician based on a singer called Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk gets a namecheck in Belcher’s book and, for those who love conspiracy theories, it may be worth noting that the writer who helped Van Ronk put his posthumously published memoir together was called Elijah Wald.
There’s more. Albert E Brumley’s 1929 spiritual “I’ll Fly Away”, which you can find on the soundtrack of the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? , also gets a mention here. This is the kind of knitting together that is intrinsic to folk on both sides of the Atlantic, where old tunes and new tunes circle each other and bind until it becomes hard to tell them apart.
Folk is – let’s be frank – always on the margins. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a place for rebellion and protest. Both Eli and Jack are marginal figures – even in their own lives, it seems. What brings them together is a need to escape from the confines of the present day, though that desire takes different forms. Eli has become a crank, a near recluse: imagine Bob Dylan crossed with J D Salinger and you’ll start to get the picture.
Belcher’s portrait of small-town life and the dark currents running under any surface is well done, and it’s clear that the author knows the drill. He lives along the same river, the Battenkill, that winds through the book; he is also on the board of directors of Caffe Lena in New York, the most venerable folk venue in United States.
Perhaps, at times, the material is a little too close to his heart. One of the strengths of Lay Down Your Weary Tune is its sense of mystery, but that mystery is stretched out just a little too long. What is going on with Eli? Who is responsible for the strange spate of crime in town? The story is a good one – laced with lost fathers and vanished daughters – but like those long, long Child ballads, it wouldn’t have suffered by losing a verse or two. And sometimes the similes get out of hand: wine glasses that “chirped like falsetto birds” when they clinked; a spine curved “like a lazy creek”. It’s lovely, but occasionally distracting.
The characters, however, are vivid and true. Jack becomes enamoured of Jenny, whose connection to Page is a puzzle right to the end of the book. Jenny is soft and strong and real, and her attachment to her ex-fiancé, a bullying local police officer called Cal, perfectly convincing. Eli stays just out of focus – but by design, dimmed to himself as well as to the people who try to get close to him. In the final pages, Jack finds a moment in which he sees: “Everything was perfect and everything was perfectly broken.” That may be the vision he has to live by. I’ll be happy to listen to the next song Belcher chooses to sing.
Lay Down Your Weary Tune by W B Belcher is published by Other Press, 408pp, £13.99
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If you’re a woman under 50, the name Mildred Hubble probably means something to you. Jill Murphy wrote her first book, The Worst Witch , when she was just 18. First published in 1974, it captivated audiences with its story of a bumbling young girl trying to scrape through her magical education. Perhaps your imagination was first caught by the books, with their descriptions of Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches, which “stood at the top of a high mountain surrounded by a pine forest” and “looked more like a prison than a school, with its gloomy grey walls and turrets,” and the students themselves “dressed in black gymslips, black stockings, black hobnailed boots, grey shirts and black-and-grey ties”.
Or perhaps it was the Nineties TV show that you really remember, starring Georgina Sherrington as Mildred, practically falling over her incredibly long plaits, and Felicity Jones as a deliciously posh and evil Ethel, Mildred’s long-standing nemesis.
However you fell in love with Mildred, Maud, Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom, there’s good news. The Worst Witch returns today on CBBC (4.30pm), with a cast borrowed from Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey , updated special effects, and a more modern take on a magical boarding school. The series will also be available globally on Netflix later this year.
Mildred Hubble is played by 13-year-old Bella Ramsey, a talented actress who frequently stole the show in several recent episodes of Game of Thrones : no easy feat in a programme overrun with known scene-thieves. But unlike Mildred Hubbles of yore, this character is not from a family of witches – she’s just a normal girl from a council estate.
Like Hermione or Harry in Harry Potter , she has no idea magic even exists until she makes her way to school. In fact, here the script seems to borrow directly from Harry Potter: Maud’s question, “Didn’t anything ever happen to you that you couldn’t explain?” is reminiscent of Hagrid’s “Not a wizard, eh? Never made things happen when you was scared or angry?”
Dowton Abbey ’s Raquel Cassidy makes for a particularly sarcastic Mistress Hardbroom, with other teachers played by Kacey Ainsworth, Clare Higgins and Amanda Holden.
There are lines about allergies and preferring “Ms” over “Mistress”, and even references to online magazines for witches. But while there are plenty of superficial updates, this new series doesn’t need to stray too far from the timeless source material.
