Book Review - The Catchers

Set in the aftermath of the first world war, Xan Brooks’s assured debut The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times (2017), shortlisted for the Costa and Authors’ Club First Novel awards, was peopled by troubled, beguiling and repellent individuals. In his second novel The Catchers, Brooks revisits the 1920s with an equally imaginative cast of characters and a propulsive narrative that immediately grabs our interest. 

In the last century, song-catchers travelled to remote parts of America in order to record and preserve traditional folk music. They often had academic or anthropological backgrounds. But the eponymous catchers of Brooks’s compelling novel are shadier types, motivated by profit, employed by record companies to “collect songs from the local hill-country musicians”. 

The main protagonist is Irish grifter John Coughlin, who gives up a life of “thieving and fighting and loafing outside the drugstore” to work for Humpty Records. He is promoted from song-plugger to catcher after paying a beggar, Spider Joe, 10 bucks for a joke record that becomes a bestseller. 

We follow Coughlin as far south as the flooded Mississippi Delta in his quest for what the catchers call “the big fish” or “firefly” — the three-minute song or performer that will make a man rich. His bosses want “New Versions of Old Familiar Tunes”, but Coughlin decides to look for original compositions.

Either way: “Thirty bucks buys a song and then the company owns it forever.” You can trace a direct line from the exploitation of musicians during these early days in the commercial recording industry to present-day debates involving streaming services. 

In Sutton, Tennessee, Coughlin records 10 acts including Peggy Prince, who “delivered wholesome, pretty tributes to the joys of first love and family and Sunday mornings in church . . . with the hard, banked fury of a woman for whom first love was a joke and who was estranged from her kin and who woke hungover on Sundays and lay in bed until noon.” 

Ever hungry for the next hit song, Coughlin decides to travel further afield in search of that elusive “firefly”. But one night he is beaten unconscious by thugs at a fairground. He convalesces at an old plantation house in Alabama, the home of the odious Colonel Bird and his wife Gwen. Here Coughlin learns of a Black teenage guitarist called Moss Evans, a booze seller in Washington County, Mississippi, whose guitar picking is said to make the bullfrogs explode.

Brooks also gives us Moss’s perspective as he runs bootleg liquor at the Mounds Landing levee in the Mississippi Delta, where Black workers and convicts had tried and failed to shore up the flood defences. Coughlin sets off on an epic journey to find the boy and his songs, but the ensuing road trip is fraught with danger. 

The author immerses us in the period and various locations, as well as recalling the horrific racism of the time. Several of his unsavoury characters, some gloriously Dickensian, are the stuff of nightmares, while the central relationship of Coughlin and Moss — and their mutual distrust — is utterly credible. Brooks’s vivid depiction of the Mississippi flood of 1927, “dogs climbing trees, bears grabbing driftwood” and its tragic aftermath, is hard to shake.

Originally published in the Financial Times