If your first reaction to the subject matter of Nick Hornby’s new book is a perplexed “Huh?”, you might take comfort in knowing its author had similar feelings. In superficial terms, his yoking together of two cultural giants – the novelist Charles Dickens and musician Prince Rogers Nelson – seems unusual given they operated not just in different media but different centuries. While both found fame early and died in their 50s, the bare bones of their biographies are otherwise wildly different. Before beginning his research, it seemed to Hornby that the biggest thing they had in common was him. “They are,” he writes, “two of what I shall have to describe … as My People – the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my work.”
A corpse serves as a surfboard on a lake full of dumped bodies. An Elvis Presley cassette is pivotal to the exposure of potential war crimes. Violent death has a silver lining: freedom from the forever traffic of Colombo. Shehan Karunatilaka’s new novel, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, audaciously reimagines modern Sri Lankan experience for Anglophone readers otherwise accustomed to the lyric gravitas and cosmopolitan textures of fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Michelle de Kretser, Romesh Gunesekera and, more recently, Anuk Arudpragasam. By striking contrast, and even if the title promises book-club exotica, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is preternaturally irreverent about the manifold brutalities in Sri Lanka during its 26-year civil war.
It’s a beautifully painted portrait of a single relationship, yes, but it also feels like a wake up call, a reminder of how easily and insidiously evil can grow and take root.
The book ends up an homage to a time when vernacular forms like folk, country and blues were the rock-solid foundations of music, rather than the beats, production tricks and techniques, and soundscapes of the last few decades. The Philosophy of Modern Song literally closes the book on the way songs were written, played, recorded and sung for a long period of time. He leaves the future, and the pleasure of the now, to those who will eventually write their own versions of this book.