DASHBOARD ELVIS IS DEAD

David F. Ross

(Orenda, £9.99)

 

In a Texas high school, a shooter kills an entire football team. A gig by a Scottish band, still young but already at the end of their tether, climaxes in a brutal bar fight. A young woman nips out the house for half an hour, leaving a child unattended. A best man is goaded into staging a daft stag-night stunt. Two things bind all these events together. One is a cheap plastic souvenir from a truck stop. The other is a song, a minor hit by a band that never made it big, which, over time, will become an iconic anthem ... and a curse.

Dashboard Elvis is Dead is, without a doubt, David F. Ross’s most ambitious novel to date. Although the core cast is deceptively small, it feels epic, traversing decades and taking in Live Aid, 9/11, Obama’s accession and the Scottish Independence Referendum. It threads into its narrative real people like Madonna, Kelpies sculptor Andy Scott and Georgia band Love Tractor while wiping Nicola Sturgeon out of existence and replacing her with a character of the author’s own devising. It’s formally adventurous, Ross not only playing his own part in the story but being forced to take some of the blame for the characters’ misfortunes. And it sees the Kilmarnock-based author stepping out of his comfort zone to write in the voice of a mixed-race Texan woman – in prose which, weirdly, often flows more naturally than the Glesca patter of his Scottish band, The Hyptones. He’s on searingly good form.

It begins in 1983, with Jude, a small-town Texan girl who never knew her Scottish father, packing a bag and leaving home after her secret (white and privileged) boyfriend is killed in a school shooting. Her vague plans of making it big in San Francisco are, however, derailed when she falls in with a couple who hold up a store at gunpoint. In their car, she hears a new release by a band from Glasgow, a song “lodged in my mind forever”, and when she finds out they’re playing nearby she can’t resist going. The disastrous gig, in Phoenix’s Razzle Rodeo Club, will change the course of several lives forever.

By this point, readers have already been introduced to The Hyptones, in the States to play a showcase they hope will land them a US record deal. The trip has been a humiliating disappointment to the band, and tempers fray. Secrets and lies are already polluting the songwriting partnership of singer Reef and guitarist Jamie, and the fact that the band is being funded by a Glasgow gangster, the father of Jamie’s girlfriend Annabelle Mason, is a source of tension that will have long-term consequences.

With all his pieces now in play, Ross shows how the ripples from even a glancing acquaintance can spread outwards and shape destinies across two continents, and how those people’s fates can remain entwined, even decades later. Jude’s willingness to embrace change, however painful, and her attempts to figure herself out and atone for her wrongs, make for a compelling story, and she continually grows in stature, while the remnants of The Hyptones, who seem to have allowed themselves to be defined by the band’s self-destruction, shrink and fragment.

What unfolds when Jude finally makes her pilgrimage to Scotland as a 55-year-old photojournalist, in the midst of a referendum campaign soundtracked by that very same Hyptones song, confirms that, even after this triumphant transatlantic road trip, Ross still has enough gas left in the tank for one final, unexpected jolt.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT