Xan Brooks’s second novel begins with John Coughlin, a rookie “song-catcher” on his first trip to backwoods Appalachia to trawl for hill country music. For a three-minute “side”, the record company will pay a flat rate of $30 – a princely sum in 1927, at least to the subsistence farmers who make the music. But if a track takes off and sells millions, that’s all the musician will ever see. Most catchers consider this more than fair, regarding folk music less as an art than as a naturally occurring phenomenon, “stirred up with the water and the soil, as if the very breath of the wind was God’s orchestra tuning up”. It’s “catching the good ones, the sellers, that require[s] real skill”. Coughlin is green enough to believe the musician deserves the credit for the music, but also hungry enough to care more about finding a hit – what catchers call a “firefly” – than about the ethical quandaries of his work.
The Catchers is a dark picaresque, abounding in eccentric figures such as Bucky, the blithely amoral local agent, who always has a dozen side projects going, from reading weather reports on the radio to promoting a girls’ baseball team; or the deliciously creepy Colonel Bird, an embodiment of white plantation culture who at 5ft-nothing is routinely mistaken for a prepubescent child. The Colonel cherishes the delusion that his ancestors secretly invented the airplane, a fact he believes has been suppressed by northerners, and presides over a realm that initially seems like a haven to Coughlin, but where homicidal violence lies just beneath the surface. Brooks is wonderful on the music of the time, conjuring artists such as Abraham Fisk, the elderly farmer who sings only about the three fields he farms, and Peggy Prince, a wholesome, pretty 18-year-old who sings “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”.
