WRITING ABOUT MUSIC, as the comedian Martin Mull put it, is like dancing about architecture. Novelists who try their hand at the story-about-a-band genre rarely produce their best goods, even when the results are interesting (Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, Iain Banks’s Espedair Street, David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue. What is it about street name titles anyway?).
With her debut novel, the Jamaican-born British writer Jacqueline Crooks has taken a different and more assured angle, by writing not about the music itself but the effect it has on the listener: and, in this case, the dancer and raver. Fire Rush — the very title invoking the “arrhythmic electricity” summoned to the body by the music — is set from 1978 to 1982, a world of cassettes, cheques and answering machine messages,…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2023