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, mostly in the suburb of Norwood in south London, among Jamaican dub music club-goers.
Our young narrator, Yamaye, does a bit of mic work herself atThe Crypt, along with her friends Asase and Rumer: “together we are a three-pin plug, charging ourselves to dub riddim”. The narrative voice, lightly sprinkled with patois, delivers the goods with a thud. A one-legged raver is described as “skanking hard-hard, using his walking stick like a spear, firing it inna the air, shouting, ‘Mash down, Babylon’”.
