book reviews

The American Boy
Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor’s atmospheric mystery novel, The American Boy – Georgette Heyer meets P D James, with late-Regency atmosphere seeping from every page – is an engrossing, genrebusting read, with added Stoke Newington.

Our flawed hero/narrator, one Thomas Shields, down on notmuch-luck-to-begin-with, embarks on a new career, in 1819, as a teacher at the Reverend Mr Bransby’s Manor House School, in the village of Stoke Newington, where the ‘situation is quite rural and the air is notably healthy’.Recognisably Church Street, then, but without the 73.

Shields, a disgraced veteran of the battle of Waterloo, is an intelligent young man of no means: he must make his own way in the world, relying only on his wits and what favour he can curry. At the school, he befriends a new boy, young Charlie Frant, and young Edgar Allan (born Poe – Charlie’s ‘American Friend’). In a suitably gothic series of plot twists – grasping American businessmen, dodgy banks, pulchritudinous heiresses who are not as good as they should be, a fearsome murder on a Hackney building site, a dash of cross-class rumpy-pumpy and more intrigue than you’d expect to encounter at the Fire Station farmers’ market – Shields gets drawn into a murky world of subterfuge, duplicity and double-cross, as he leaves his post at the school to attend Charlie and the young Edgar as tutor-guardian. As he’s drawn deeper into the affairs of the Frant family, he begins to realise that nothing is quite as it should be, or as it seems.

As Shields attempts to unravel and understand the complexities and intrigues of his ‘betters’ and to resist the charms of the lovely but apparently unattainable Sophie, Charlie’s by-now widowed mama, he must also try to make sense of Charlie’s father’s death, the death-bed codicil he signs, the mystery of a bank’s missing millions – and the apparent reappearance of young Edgar’s real father, the malevolent Poe senior. To give more of the plot away would spoil the story, but be assured, gentle reader, it’s a cracker.

And for Poe aficionados there’s added fun in spotting possible clues. Did the French-speaking parrot ––‘ayez peur’’– become transformed in Poe’s adult imagination into the Raven (‘never more’)? What of the missing finger, the incarceration, and countless other horrors? Never mind ‘never more’: curl up and enjoy.

(Flamingo, £6.99)
Review by Anne Beech

Chimes of Freedom: the politics of Bob Dylan’s art
Mike Marqusee

‘Keep a clean nose, watch the plainclothes, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’. For many who were young teenagers in the early to mid 1960s (like I) the seven Bob Dylan albums spanning Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde were a revelation. Dylan’s lyrics, from the achingly tender intimacy of Visions of Johanna through the madcap stridency of Subterranean Homesick Blues to the apocalyptic nightmare of Desolation Row, were matched in their majesty only by the man himself, a crazed young prophet, a surreal visionary for that tumultuous decade.

In his new book, Stoke Newington resident Mike Marqusee – author of, among others, the highly praised Redemption Song, a book about Muhammad Ali – eloquently considers the phenomenon that was Dylan in the 1960s, with particular emphasis on his political influences and impact on popular culture in that era of the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights marches and the Vietnam War. Marqusee places Dylan in the radical tradition of the blues and the work of such as Woody Guthrie and the emerging folk revival. He argues that Dylan’s art can be understood as much in the context of the political struggles of the time as in his deeply personal and ever evolving quest for spiritual understanding. He concludes the book with an examination of the increasingly commodified counterculture of the late 1960s and Dylan’s response to this with the Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding.

Marqusee offers incisive and revealing analyses of his lyrics and, although fans of his Bobness will know that this is not the first time such a task has been undertaken, the author nonetheless suggests fresh and plausible explanations of Dylan’s work. His scholarship is impressive and his writing style is absorbing and often lyrical.    Every Dylan fan will learn something new from Marqusee’s labour of love.

Dylan was no saint and could be brattish, manipulative and often cruel. But during these early, awesomely productive, speed fuelled years, he was a genius. Chimes of Freedom perfectly captures the essence of this young icon of the times, and Marqusee is to be ongratulated on his revealing and hugely enjoyable book
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(The New Press, £14.95. Published on 9 October)
Review by Rab MacWilliam