Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne

The camera crew films everything and the director is supplementing it all by filming on his phone. He’s walking around the action, a manic grin on his red and sweating face. A few years from now, reflecting on the success of his acclaimed documentary, One Night in Dublin, he will say that this was the moment that changed everything for him, the night Rex Casey didn’t turn up for a film shoot and he rediscovered the joys of filming ‘regular folk’. Snoopy, watching that interview while having his supper, will find it very patronizing.

Half a mile away, lying in a strange bed after a strange day, Rex Casey feels a pang of regret. He thinks of his wife in New York. He thinks of his children. Coming back to Dublin was a mistake, he decides. None of these people were really his friends. He resolves to call the label in the morning to cancel the documentary. He’ll probably cancel the tour, too. Next to him Dasha dreams of Kyiv before the war and a life far away from Dubliners and their tiny problems.

Back in the High Times Tavern, away from the jigs and the cheering and the circling cameras, Snoopy sits in a stairwell near the toilets with a broken guitar in his arms. He picks out some chords. The shapes come with muscle memory but his fingers feel stiff. He strums and sings a few croaky notes. It’s an old Heathens song. Their band – Snoopy and Maggie and Burton and Joss. They were the 1000th best band in the word – that’s what Joss used to say. Snoopy’s voice has changed since the last time he sang. It’s lower, rougher. He tries a verse. He tries a chorus. It feels good. He closes his eyes and sings a whole song. When he looks up, he sees Maggie watching him. She is tapping out the rhythm with her index finger on her leg and his heart is thumping heavily along. It’s the first time in twenty years he has seen her tap a rhythm. For Maggie’s part, it’s the first time in twenty years she has heard Snoopy sing. And in that moment they are young and hopeful and Joss Boland lives again.

Experts in a Dying Field follows the surviving members of The Heathens, the self-proclaimed 1000th best band of all time, who inexplicably become re-connected over 20 years after a bus crash that left physically and emotionally traumatised. A series of coincidences and chance encounters leads Snoopy, Maggie and Burton to have a chance to reflect on their youth and past life, while bonding again through music.

Patrick Freyne is a longstanding and popular writer for the Irish Times. The style in the novel is certainly reminiscent of columns or essays, each chapter feeling at times like a small self-contained work. It’s almost like a scrapbook of collected pieces; while there are plenty of straight forward chapters, there’s also chapters that take the form of fictionalised music reviews, poems/lyrics, even a play script. The story of Experts in a Dying Field jumps around a lot, and at times its hard to build too much of a connection to any of the characters with the largely satellite narrative structure.

I have struggled to put my finger on why I found this a bit of a chore to read. It just felt pretty ordinary. I’d rather have read a biography of a band I liked than a fictional one I have no connection to. There’s nothing inherently bad about this book, I especially appreciate the experimental approach Freyne took, it just didn’t gel with me.