Waterloo Sunset by Ray Davies

Between his two autobiographies X-Ray and Americana, Kinks frontman Ray Davies also wrote a book of short stories. I'm not sure if it was his idea, or imposed on him by the publisher, but Waterloo Sunset is explicitly a book of stories directly inspired by or adapted from his songs.

It was published in 1997. It seems to have become deeply obscure almost immediately: I think there was a US edition, but what I have is a British Penguin paperback (rather battered) that I found randomly a few years back at a library sale.

Which is reasonably appropriate: it's an odd, quirky book that probably had more of a life in the UK to begin with. I don't know if I'm going to get into the minutiae of all the stories here - there are seventeen in about 250 pages, all named after and telling versions of his famous songs - but maybe I can give a sense of the gestalt of the thing.

It has something of a vague narrative arc, focused on shopworn semi-rock-and-roll star Les Mulligan, who is not Ray Davies but acts as his stand-in. (And isn't present in most of the book: the conceit, intermittently, is that these are the characters in the mind or songs of "the songwriter," who may be Mulligan or may more directly be Davies. There's a repeated motif that they're waiting, wherever they are, for him to actually turn them into something, that they'll keep doing the same few actions forever unless or until the song actually gets made.) Mulligan is attempting a comeback, in what seems to be the late '80s or early '90s, and has connected with agent Richard Tennant to negotiate with United for a big record deal: a new crowd-pleaser, plus the whole back catalog. Stories about the Mulligan-Tennant connection - mostly about Tennant, who is posher than Mulligan but generally on the side of good, unlike the vaguely-sketched record-company folks - pop up throughout the book, interspersed with stories about other characters, come of whom also recur or connect. 

The stories are all named after Kinks songs - songs Davies wrote, he'd probably say - from "Rock and Roll Fantasy" to "Celluloid Heroes" to "Return to Waterloo" to "Afternoon Tea" to the title song. They all tend to retell the story of the song in a slightly longer form, or maybe give the parts of the story that had previously been only in Davies' head.

I found the prose to be just fine - Davies always was a good wordsmith - but they're not great as stories a lot of the time, instead focusing on detailing motivations and inner states of the characters at great detail, explicating all of the things the original songs left implied. They don't have strong story-structures a lot of the time: like songs, they express a mood or a particular moment, and then stop. Like most books of this kind, it's very much for big fans, for people who want a ten-page story loosely based on the song "Driving" and fascinated to see what might have been in Davies' mind when he wrote that song. (Or, as I think more likely, inspired him two or three decades later when he wrote this book based on those songs.)