This book is part mystery, part road trip, part behind the music, part reflection on celebrity and how women are treated in the music industry, and also has almost a dash of a fairytale about it. In the novel’s world, once upon a time (back in the early 1990’s), The Lighting Bottles were on top of the charts, a husband and wife duo, with him coming straight out of the Seattle Scene (she’s from Canada). But behind the scenes (and this is the behind-the-music part) there were drugs, alcohol abuse, relationship woes, a bitter former bandmate, and the toxicity of fame and the music industry.
Everything comes crashing down for the duo in December 1994, when Elijah (the male half of the Lightning Bottles and the more approachable one, the one the media has dubbed the tortured male genius who has to deal with his shrew of a wife ….) takes a rowboat out into the Iceland Sea and …vanishes. He’s presumed dead, and while she didn’t row him out into the ocean herself, Jane Prye his wife, and the other half of the duo has been found guilty in the court of public opinion.
The story is centred on Jane in 1999 as she continues to deal with the fallout of her husband’s disappearance/death and the way that the media have painted her. Jane wrote the songs that The Lightning Bottles performed, and she wanted fame, and she was ambitious and stood up for the band, and pushed to have things done in ways to benefit the band and – yet she’s kind of hated. Everyone thinks Elijah wrote the music. Everyone thinks she might as well have pushed him to his death. She has come across as cold, and distant, and while she and Elijah were both being sued by an ex-bandmate of Elijah with him gone, it’s just her left to deal with the lawsuit.
Jane retreats to Germany, the country that was the last place she and Elijah performed. She’s renting a house that happens to be next door to a teenage girl (Hen) who was there at the last show. And who thinks that Elijah is still alive and is leaving messages for Jane ….So Jane and Hen end up on a European road trip, chasing down the clues. The book then alternates between them in the present with flashbacks to how Jane and Elijah meet, their rise to fame and the issues that arose in their relationship with each other and the public.
There are a fair bit of references to actual bands and some fictionalized versions of famous people and places. I’m not that well-versed in grunge/alternative music of the early 90’s so sometimes I wasn’t sure who was real and who wasn’t. This didn’t distract me, and sometimes it was fun to go “oh that must be the Viper Room, and that is Sinéad O’Connor. Others, like Bono and Michael Stipe get called out by their actual name. (As a note the author has created a playlist on Spotify for the novel, and I enjoyed playing that in the background while reading the novel.)
Jane is not the most warm and welcoming character, but to be fair, the book outlines her background and it makes sense why she’d want to keep people at arm’s length. I think it’s also fair to think that you want something (fame) and then get it and be like “Well this isn’t exactly what I hoped for.” Also, I can see why Elijah as a brilliant but troubled musician type would have more mass appeal to an audience. But the book highlights the criticism and grief that Jane receives simply becasue she is a woman in the male-dominated space of rock music. You can see a lot of parallels to actual women in rock and roll. And yes, when I was reading this book, I could draw some very specific parallels (it’s not an exact retread of a famous Seatle musician and his wife but …). In fact, the book itself is dedicated to, amongst others, Courtney Love.
Overall I enjoyed this, despite not being that familiar with the music that inspired it. The song lyrics for the band’s songs are written out at the end so that was kind of neat. I liked the end, even if it did make me go “oh well it’s going there I guess”. Sometimes I want a bit of rock and roll fantasy in my life.