Benjamin Myers clearly has a penchant for stories in which ties unexpectedly bind. Having written so generously about unlikely friendships in two previous books – 2019’s The Offing and 2022’s The Perfect Golden Circle – he does so again now with Rare Singles.
The British writer’s ninth novel takes place over a single weekend in Scarborough. Bucky Bronco is a forgotten singer from Chicago who, 40 years ago, had the merest glimpse of success, but things ever since have been disappointing. If, back then, he traded in soul music, now his life is very much a depiction of the blues: increasingly at odds with the modern world, grieving his late wife and hooked on prescription drugs. Just when he convinces himself that, like all good bluesmen, his future comprises nothing but sepia-tinged memories and an expectant grave plot, he receives an unlikely invitation: to headline a soul weekender in Yorkshire, which, he has it on good authority, is somewhere over the sea, in England, a place, he presumes, “of kings and queens. Country houses and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn. Cups of tea.”
Bucky hasn’t performed live since the 1960s, and remains convinced he no longer can. Nevertheless, he accepts because he needs the money. The fact that, upon landing, he forgets to retrieve his much-needed opioids from the plane poses an immediate problem: cold turkey is not a good look for a festival headliner.
In this notional place of country houses and cucumber sandwiches is Dinah, a middle-aged woman living with her shoplifting husband – who also drinks and farts, often in that order – and a feckless adult son too stoned to motivate himself towards real life. Dinah works the tills at the local supermarket, and is so desperate for diversion that she willingly undertakes a side hustle shepherding Bucky for the 48 hours until the concert. Over the course of two days, this pair of lonely, dispirited souls not only find much in common, but are able to inject an optimism into each other that they singularly fail to do for themselves.
After the kaleidoscopic experimentalism of Myers’s previous novel, Cuddy, about the seventh-century monk St Cuthbert, Rare Singles is more a series of vivid Polaroid snapshots. But it’s a deceptively simple tale that dares to tackle existential crises, concluding that the best way to survive them is simply to reach out and connect with others.
Myers is a ridiculously prolific writer, and while there is no clear path from 18th-century coin forgers (2017’s The Gallows Pole) to this short, sweet and charming hymn to the power of music, he nonetheless navigates it all so skilfully.