Tracking life’s bittersweet symphony

GREATEST HITS

LAURA BARNETT’S debut novel The Versions Of Us was a huge hit when it was released in 2015, enchanting readers and topping bestseller charts.

The touching romance’s USP was an ambitious structure in which three different takes on the same love story are played out over 60 years.

Barnett’s follow-up is built around another unusual structure: a greatest hits album. It tells the story of Cass Wheeler, a hugely successful singer with a string of hits to her name dating back to the 1970s. But for the past 10 years, she has not written a single song or sung a solitary note.

After personal tragedy pushed her to a breakdown, she withdrew from public life at the height of her success, exchanging fame and music for solitude and silence.

The novel begins in 2015, a decade after her self-imposed exile began, when Cass agrees with her record company to put together a greatest hits album. “Not, she’d said, the obvious songs – the label had put that record out long ago – but the songs that meant the most to her. The songs that tracked the arc of a lifetime.”

Cass returns to the back catalogue she had tried to turn her back on, forcing herself to delve into the painful past she was trying to forget.

The story flits back and forth between past and present with each chapter preceded by the lyrics of a song, the “greatest hits” of the title. The songs are deeply personal to Cass, each one illustrating a different time in her life, from her unhappy childhood growing up with a depressed and neglectful mother to her dizzying ascent to the top of the music industry and the tragedy that shapes her later years.

The early parts of the novel are deftly drawn, sharply evoking a painful childhood that lacks warmth, love and acceptance. When Cass is 10, her mother makes a heartbreaking decision that blows the family apart and its devastating after-effects ripple through the rest of the novel. But while Cass’s childhood quickly draws the reader in, the pace slows when her career takes off. While the parts of the novel that deal with her tempestuous relationship are gripping and moving, the story of her rise through the music business is less absorbing. And structuring the novel around songs is an interesting concept that does not work quite as well as it could have. Barnett, below, teamed up with musician Kathryn Williams to release Songs From The Novel Greatest Hits, based on the songs in the novel. However, unless you buy the record, the lyrics add little to an otherwise engaging story, although some might want to study them for extra meaning. Despite this, there is still much to enjoy and fans of The Versions Of Us will relish Barnett’s deft writing about music, memory and love and how finding the power to put the past behind you can unlock a future you never knew existed.