When it comes to listening to pop music, there are two types of people: those who pay attention to the lyrics and those who don’t notice them. The former are drawn to artists such as Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen; the latter end up choosing a song about breaking up as the first dance at their wedding. Greatest Hits is a novel for music lovers who pay attention to the words.
Now in her 60s, Cass Wheeler is an “ex-musician. Ex-mother. Ex-daughter. Ex-wife.” She is at home, in the remote farmhouse where she lives alone after huge personal loss and a spell in rehab. Spending one day forcing herself to listen to her entire back catalogue, she compiles “a very particular kind of retrospective. Her life, reflected in the songs she had written; in the songs that she, and only she, could choose.”
Barnett has written the songs – the lyrics and fictional album notes begin each chapter – and the singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has set Barnett’s lyrics to music. Her companion album, Songs from the Novel Greatest Hits, will be released this month. Readers will have to decide whether to start with the book and then hear how Williams has interpreted the songs, or listen to the album, allow their own stories to form around the lyrics, and then discover Barnett’s version.
Although the novel is set over the course of one day, the majority of it unfolds through flashbacks, each chapter prompted by a song. The first, “Common Ground”, begins, “It was early morning when she left … ” Cass’s difficult birth is followed by a fractious relationship with her mother, who abandons her family two weeks after Cass’s 10th birthday, leaving a note on the kitchen table. The loss shadows her throughout her life; she becomes restless, a bolter.
The one thing she can commit to is music. So when she meets a man with whom she feels both a sexual and a musical connection, the results are electric: “Above all,” she recalls, “there was music, and there was Ivor, and there was her inability to tell where her love for one spilt over into her love for the other.” They become a celebrated musical duo, but Cass – a sort of Sandy Denny in biker boots – is the real star, and Ivor finds that difficult to bear.
We know this love affair will not have a happy ending. The crux of the novel is that creative tension, and the question of how a woman can protect her identity when the boundary becomes blurred between self, music and love. “Perhaps, then, it had always been there between them – that sharpened note, that jarring semiquaver – and Cass had simply not wanted to hear it. She had trusted in – what? In the rare, astringent beauty of it; in the crack in everything … Perfection was impossible, its pursuit banal: in art, in life, in love, it was the flaws, the mistakes, the disharmonies, that spoke the loudest, that drew us closest to the stuff of real experience.”
The novel is muddled in places, with a few too many characters and the odd bit of stilted dialogue. But it has a wisdom and a harmony that are satisfying, as Cass considers “all the years that had, with such incomprehensible swiftness, rolled by and disappeared”.
Who knows where the time goes? People who listen to the words will find one intriguing answer in Greatest Hits.
• Greatest Hits is published by W&N. To order a copy for £9.74 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
