A new Rachel Joyce is always something to look forward to. Joyce specialises in writing about ordinary people, their trials and tribulations and funny ways. Especially their funny ways.
It’s 1988. Frank owns a music shop. He insists on selling only vinyl, despite this being the dawn of the CD. But Frank is not just any music shop owner, a far cry from the intimidating list-making types captured so well in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. Frank is welcoming, and happy to broaden his customer’s knowledge and improve their lives through his own knowledge in music. He makes links to different genres, and prescribes them to customers the way a doctor would with medicine.
Frank has attracted a group of friends equally as eccentric. The music shop is housed in a sad, neglected row of shops that a development company is trying to knock down to build ‘luxury’ flats. Scrawled National Front slogans mark many of the boarded up shop fronts. Frank’s friends own many of the businesses nearby and all are uncertain of the future. The Music Shop is, in many ways, a focal point for them all and Frank its unwilling leader. But Frank is alone. We know that his mother Peg bequeathed her love of music to him but she is dead and Frank has no one else. He is a man who needs to be prescribed ‘Verdi Cries’ by 10,000 Maniacs.
One morning, Ilsa Brauchmann, a woman in a green coat stands outside the shop. She catches Frank’s eye and then she faints onto the pavement. It’s a strange start to a strange relationship but Frank finds himself drawn to her and when she asks him to teach him about music they go on a series of ‘dates’ to a local cafe where he talks and brings her records. But Ilsa has a secret and this could ruin everything.
It’s the cast of characters and their interactions that make this book. Frank mostly plays it straight but others are allowed to be as eccentric as possible, and I especially love Kit, Frank’s young clumsy loving music shop assistant who likes to hand-draw their posters.
But there is a serious point to make too, about the pace of technology and development and how it can leave people behind. And then of course, there’s the music. We need a playlist to go with this book, to play as you read. I love that this has such variety, that a plotline about Handel’s Messiah sits alongside Aretha Franklin. Frank talks to people about music the way none of my boyfriends ever did, and their conversations were the poorer for it. Here we can clearly see that music has a power, to change, to heal, to talk to others and that it can take the soul of the lowliest people and make it fly.
The Music Shop is about connecting with others, about how we’re all worth a little time and effort, no matter how low we get. It’s about the wonder of Vivaldi and Miles Davis and Shalamar (yes really).
The Music Shop is published by Doubleday on 13 July
Thanks to Alison Barrow for the review copy.
Susan E Barsby 