All bands are dysfunctional families. Just watch the jaw-dropping Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster or pick any half-hour chunk of the Beatles’ film Get Back and you’ll inevitably witness bullying, passive aggression, petulance, confusion and unwarranted advice. It will all feel painfully familiar to anyone who has siblings.
Most bands are formed by people barely out of their teens, so they tend to drag their family dynamics into the back of the van with them. It’s all they know. Your bandmates are people you love, depend upon and admire on certain occasions. But most of the time, you want to stab them for that noise they make when they breathe out.
In his new novel, Experts in a Dying Field, Patrick Freyne creates a dizzying, hilarious, heart-wrenching tale centred around Dublin-based indie band the Heathens, who considered themselves the 1,000th best band in the world (they’re realists) and had moderate success in the early 2000s before tragedy cut their burgeoning career short. Elements of the book are extracted from Freyne’s life in the band the NPB.
“My music-scene experience was a major training ground for everything else I’ve ever done,” Freyne tells me. “I learned more from that 10 years than my friends who went off to work in banks. You’ve got this network, and I tried to represent this in the book, doing things here or there to help or generally support you.”
Now an acclaimed writer at the Irish Times and the author of the wonderful essay collection, Ok, Now Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea, Freyne has long harboured ambitions to tackle fiction, but is finally realising his dream has taken a while.
“This book is definitely part of a midlife crisis,” he reveals. “But I think it’s a positive midlife crisis. I’m trying to channel some of the positive bits of my 20s into my 50s. There’s dysfunctional stuff in your 20s, like not entirely being yourself, and part of the book is a bit about that. It’s about the surviving members of the band coming to terms with who they are.”
The novel deals with the surviving members of the Heathens reconvening in Dublin after 20 years. The tragic death of the band’s talismanic lead singer and songwriter, Joss, has shaped all of their lives in a variety of ways. As well as carrying this tremendous sense of loss, the band members also have to consider what might have been.
“I don’t think failing makes you a failure,” Freyne explains. “I think failing is just part of life and it probably took me to this age to realise that. There are moments when you think you are the best thing in the world, like when you come up with something. And there’s moments when you go, ‘Oh, my God, we are woefully shit.’”
But this ambitious book is far more than the reminiscences of a half-remembered musical outfit. There’s a performance artist who has a run-in with a woodchipper, computer abuse, strange financial misdealings, oddly prescient foxes and even God in a supporting role. It sprawls in the best possible way.
“I always knew I wanted it to be polyphonic, with loads of voices,” he tells me. “There’s something kind of really egalitarian about the polyphonic novel when you compare it to one-character narratives. I don’t know if this rings totally true, but there’s something kind of lefty about it, where you give everyone a voice.”
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Characters are drawn mostly from Freyne’s imagination, some from friends lost in the past, but also from his many years working as a journalist and meeting people both extraordinary and completely normal.
“When you do the kind of journalism I do, you just go, ‘All right, the smartest people in the world aren’t on top’. There’s an awful lot of people running around the city who’ve had hard lives and they’re just clever and funny and I always wanted to reflect some of those.
“Though real people say shit all the time that isn’t realistic. It makes for great copy, but when you take some of those things and put them into fiction, people go, ‘No one would say that’. My big realisation about fiction is that, in a weird way, people have to ring truer than they do in real life.”
Freyne has somehow managed a sort of alchemy, combining the devastatingly real with the wildly fantastic to produce a gulpable, radical novel with music beating at the heart of it.
“I’m kind of creatively greedy, so I like doing lots of different things. And I’ve realised that all the forms of writing I’ve done do have a through line to them. I think a lot of fiction, maybe the roots of fiction, come from the grey area between fact and how your memory works.”
Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne is published by Sandycove
Dale Shaw is producer of the You’re Booked podcast
