The Catchers by Xan Brooks review – this dark picaresque is a delight

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”.

The most important musician – and the second main character in the book – is Moss Evans, a poor African American kid with a $2 guitar and a throng of songs in his head that won’t leave him alone. When we meet him, he’s working as a hooch boy, delivering liquor to the work crews shoring up the levee that protects Greenville, Mississippi. These crews consist of a few white men with rifles overseeing a host of Black convict labourers. Moss is regarded by almost everyone around him as the worst musician who ever lived; as he reflects, his songs “[start] out fine, but then would crab-walk and change costumes so that they became unrecognisable”. Of course the reader recognises – as Coughlin will – that this wrongness is a form of genius.

This all takes place against the backdrop of the great Mississippi flood, when rain falls torrentially, washing out roads and swelling the river until it “[gives] the impression of being as much land as liquid, heaving with fence posts and barn-sides and uprooted, stripped trees”. By its end, it will have inundated 27,000 sq miles, sweeping away people, homes and the norms of society, and setting them all down again in unexpected places. Brooks turns the flood into a complex political metaphor, which develops subtly and manifests in dozens of forms. At its heart is the recurrent image of the army of Black convicts and conscripts at the levee, forced at gunpoint to maintain a barrier that is also somehow the race line. In one key passage, a white woman hears the deep rumble of the levee breaking and sees a wall of water rushing towards her house. “The thing came out of the woods and crossed into the cotton, six-feet-high and the colour of leather. Too fast to outrun, too broad to outflank … ” She knows this must be the flood that has long been threatened. Still, in her panic, her first thought is of a legendary slave revolt, and its “hundreds of slaves … bent on murder, [advancing] in a long line through the field like an army”.

This book deals with some of the most painful episodes of African American history, and one can’t help being conscious at times of Brooks as a white British writer, a disconnection made more treacherous by the fact that the book is itself about cultural appropriation. Brooks is clearly well aware of this problem, and deals with it boldly, letting his Black characters feel a hatred that is sometimes ugly, while showing the white characters meriting that hatred, even as they are fully human. And as historical fiction, The Catchers is a delight. It puts us in a world that feels both fantastical and achingly real, at once completely alien and vividly our own.

• The Catchers by Xan Brooks is published by Salt (£10.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.