Safe Return Doubtful

British Literature – Published 2024

For Brooks these days, writing is of secondary importance to his focus on cinema, for which he is an associate editor at the Guardian.
I very much enjoyed his first novel, [book:The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times|32869842], and this is a strong follow-up.

It is set during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and concerns the growing popularity of ‘hillbilly music’ at the time. In the 1920s several record labels (Columbia, Brunswick for example) started to record and sell it. The recording lathe was invented which led to sing-catchers travelling Appalachia scouting for talent and carrying out recording sessions on location.

John Coughlin, the protagonist, is such a song-catcher, working for Humpty Rceords, and finds himself in small town Tennessee. He hears of a black teenage guitarist, Moss Evans, who works moving bootleg liquor in the Mississippi Delta. Meanwhile, the river begins to flood, bringing racial discrimination to a flash point.

There are many things Brooks does well here; his careful research and his lyrical descriptions of the landscape, the weather, and the simmering racial tensions.

But in the last third the novel loses its way. Coughlin decides to take Moss Evans back to New York instead of recording him on location, and the plot, which was captivating becomes increasingly bizarre and hard to follow.

It’s all very cinematic, and one of those books in which a really good story is in there somewhere, just frustratingly goes wandering in its latter section.

My GoodReads score 4 / 5