Robert Forster, the frontman of the Go-Betweens, is a man of many talents. He has contributed to one of Brisbane's greatest cultural exports, penned a moving memoir about his songwriting partnership with Grant McLennan, and written excellent music criticism. However, his debut novel at age 68, a caper about musicians and music-making, hits a disappointing note.
A Dud Note in Fiction
Songwriters on the Run, set in 1991 in central Queensland, follows Mick Woods and Drew Lovelock, two long-maned musicians in their 30s. After some international tours and two albums with a folk-rock sound, they face trouble when police catch them with marijuana and charge them with credit card fraud and driving a stolen car. They escape from a correctional facility with help from oddly cooperative inmates and go on the run.
The novel is structured with oddly named sections like "Days Before" and "Days After." Mick and Drew try to reach Melbourne to contact their manager, Bingo, whom they suspect is behind their troubles. Meanwhile, a US agent from Warner Bros. Publishing seeks to identify two singer-songwriters on a blank cassette tape. The plot includes impromptu gigs, drugs, love at first sight, and reflections on the protagonists' attractiveness and brilliance.
A Comic Odyssey That Falls Short
The novel is tongue-in-cheek and PG-13, but it does not live up to Paul Kelly's cover blurb calling it a "comic odyssey" or "crime thriller." The claim of it being a "nuts-and-bolts account of making art" is also overstated; there is little evocative description of music-making. Some lyric-writing incorporates Forster's own lines, but emotional resonance is lacking. A musing from Mick on songwriting sounds AI-generated: "Be universal, not personal. Do sneaky things like bring in characters, male or female, living in the present or past, to say and emote things you want to get across."
The prose lacks melody or rhythm and is overwhelmed with plodding dialogue full of exposition. Clichés like "If only love and life could be written like a song" appear, and some sentences should have been edited out. For instance: "Her prominent feature is a long straight nose, dividing her face into two attractive sides" and "Bingo twirls an arm over the armrest as if scooping water from a leaky boat."
Evocative Australian Scenes
Forster is more engaging when capturing Australian scenes and locales of past decades. He evokes well the "whippet-thing, track-suited desperados, hunting for heroin" in 1980s St Kilda. There are nice passages of small-town Queensland, which Mick and Drew watch wake up like "one of those movie camera tricks, where a flower is shown to open, bloom and die in thirty seconds." These bits of imagery and sense of place are too few to sustain the reader.
For audiophiles, there are nods to music greats that can feel shoehorned in. After Mick and Drew are taken to Capricorn Correctional Facility, Drew asks if it is abbreviated as CCF, not CCR—Creedence Clearwater Revival, "one of the five best American bands of the sixties." Despite the weak story, Forster's experience and love of music are apparent and enriching.
Songwriters on the Run by Robert Forster is published by Penguin Australia ($34.99).
