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
It’s pretty much impossible not to fantasise about that first run-in with your ex. Yes, this time, you won’t be sweaty and make up-free in Sainsbury’s, trying to hide the fact that you’re locked out of your flat. No, you’ll be cool, calm and collected, with your ridiculously gorgeous new date.
Chewing Gum ’s Tracey (both played and created by Michaela Coel) uses children’s toys to facilitate her own fantasy, and imagines it going something like this. “Oh, my god! Connor? Connor! It’s Tracey! Yeah, no, no I know I look different now! Yeah, I’ve becomes successful! Is this wide-legged hyena your new girlfriend? Oh? I wish I could but I’ve actually got to go and see Beyoncé. Yeah, I’m going to fly there.”
Aaaand enter the ex, just as she lifts her plastic dolly in the air zooming her off to her imaginary Beyoncé concert. Improvised make-up, fake boyfriends, and bizarre avoidance tactics follow.
This is a relatively minor catastrophe in the life of disaster-prone Tracey, and perhaps one of the least cringe-worthy punchlines in a terrifyingly relatable episode, the first of Chewing Gum ’s second season. The first season included a whole host of openly horny women, scenes of mass dildo washing and jokes about “throbbing so hard it’s like my vagina’s got epilepsy” and Coel’s brilliantly dirty sitcom shows no signs of toning down in its second series. The farcical climax of the first episode involves a disabled toilet, sexy dancing, fake orgasms and a healthy dose of projectile vomiting.
This first episode takes place almost entirely within the confines of the newsagent where Tracey works, so there was little opportunity to reconnect with the hyperreal housing estate where much of the last season was set. But supporting cast members still shone in this episode – in particular Ola (played by Olisa Odele, Ola is, in Odele’s own words, a “Nigerian diva” and “full time bad bitch”).
