Surely you\u2019ve 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 \u2013 performing in clubs and at festivals, for \u00adaudiences 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 \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019s more. Albert E Brumley\u2019s 1929 spiritual \u201cI\u2019ll Fly Away\u201d, which you can find on the soundtrack of the Coens\u2019 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 \u2013 let\u2019s be frank \u2013 always on the margins. If it weren\u2019t, it wouldn\u2019t be a place for rebellion and protest. Both Eli and Jack are marginal figures \u2013 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 \u00adrecluse: imagine Bob Dylan crossed with J D Salinger and you\u2019ll start to get the picture.
Belcher\u2019s portrait of small-town life and the dark currents running under any surface is well done, and it\u2019s 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 \u2013 laced with lost fathers and vanished daughters \u2013 but like those long, long Child ballads, it wouldn\u2019t have suffered by losing a verse or two. And sometimes the similes get out of hand: wine glasses that \u201cchirped like falsetto birds\u201d when they clinked; a spine curved \u201clike a lazy creek\u201d. It\u2019s 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-fianc\u00e9, a bullying local police officer called Cal, perfectly convincing. Eli stays just out of focus \u2013 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: \u201cEverything was perfect and everything was perfectly broken.\u201d That may be the vision he has to live by. I\u2019ll 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, \u00a313.99
As the UK papers proudly boasted this morning, \u201cBrits won big\u201d at last night\u2019s Golden Globe awards.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association awarded accolades to Hugh Laurie, Olivia Colman and Tom Hiddleston for the BBC\u2019s The Night Manager , while Claire Foy was celebrated for her turn in Netflix\u2019s The Crown , which also won Best TV Drama. Aaron Taylor-Johnson surprised audiences by picking up the Best Supporting Actor in a Drama award for his performance in Nocturnal Animals.
So, yes, well done us. But aside from Taylor-Johnson\u2019s unexpected win, all of these awards are for TV, not film, and so they don\u2019t necessarily hint at Oscars glory for UK talent this year.
The US\u2019s interest in British television has grown and grown in the last few years. British TV exports to the US rose 10 per cent to more than $800m in 2014. Downton Abbey became American network PBS\u2019s highest-rated series in history , and Call The Midwife has also been popular on the network. BBC America has scored high ratings with Doctor Who , Sherlock , and Broadchurch, while The Night Manager and Tom Hardy\u2019s Taboo are successful BBC co-productions with AMC and FX respectively.
Meanwhile, the growth of streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon means British programming is more easily finding an international audience. US Netflix has hosted a number of British shows including Happy Valley , Peaky Blinders , The Fall , Luther , Lovesick , and Netflix originals like The Crown , while Amazon has found American audiences for Fleabag and Ripper Street \u2013 the latter was cancelled until Amazon helped fund its recommission.
So it is true that more British television is reaching a wider American audience than ever before \u2013 and scooping up more awards as a result.
But in terms of the film industry, Brits like Taylor-Johnson winning at the Golden Globes says nothing at all. As Mark Kermode wrote back in 2011 , \u201cIn truth, the movie industries of Britain and America are inextricably intertwined [\u2026] Sadly, there\u2019s little that\u2019s newsworthy about that arrangement.\u201d<\/p>\n

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