Rock & Roll: a novel

Through unfolding, fragmentary memoirs, the disconnected odyssey of Nick Numbers, a rock music critic working in London and LA through the 1970s into the early 1980s, Rock & Roll explores the multiple realities that exist between documentary, documentable fact and supposedly pure fiction. Real people and verifiable occurrences are interwoven with invented characters and situations in a way that blurs any clear distinction between the two. The book also sees how the power of additions such as images and footnotes can add, or perhaps undermine, authority and credibility to a story. Meanwhile, stories connect the twin musical and lyrical strands, black rhythm and blues and the writings of the Beat generation, that somehow merged in the mid-1960s to produce rock music. They play with the self-imposed otherness of the self-defined rebel, and how this normalises behaviour that would be unacceptable outside the bubble of exemption. They connect, in passing, Nick Numbers' odyssey with earlier models, Homer, Joyce, C.P. Cavafy and Richard Fariña, heroic, anti-heroic and mock-heroic. And they grapple with the very nature of storytelling itself, the relationship between the storyteller and the story, between the storyteller and the audience, something that goes right back to an essential distinction between Homer, the bard, and Odysseus, the teller of tales who gets to relate his own remarkable, perhaps even incredible, adventures. In a world of truthiness, of alternative facts, a post-factual world, how can fiction respond to increasingly abstract or, perhaps, simply cynical notions of truth and veracity? If the real world can cut its facts from whole cloth to suit the needs of the occasion, where does that leave the storyteller? If the role of any artist or creator, as Hamlet says of playing, is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, one response is to reflect and highlight the untrustworthiness of everything. Rock & Roll does not merely have an unreliable narrator, it explores an unreliable world. The book is followed by "Why I Write What I Write," a self-reflective, or reflexive essay that explores the route I took to start writing it