The Music Shop: A Novel

"He played the whole record, side one and then side two. As he listened, Frank smoked and danced in the cramped space behind his turntable, rolling his shoulders and swinging his hips – watching him, even Maud began to sway – while Kit did something that was possibly the funky chicken, but could equally be to do with his new shoes hurting his feet"

The Music Shop is the fourth full-length novel by best-selling British author, Rachel Joyce. Frank would only sell vinyl. It didn't matter that this was 1988, cassettes were still popular, CDs were the in thing; vinyl was what Frank knew and loved. The shop was in Unity Street, a dead-end street with a parade of run-down shops, a pub and houses opposite.

"Frank could not play music, he could not read a score, he had no practical knowledge whatsoever, but when he sat in front of a customer and truly listened, he heard a kind of song. He wasn't talking a full-blown symphony. It would be a few notes; at most, a strain. And it didn't happen all the time, only when he let go of being Frank and inhabited a space that was more in the middle. It had been this way ever since he could remember." Frank had a talent for knowing what his customers needed.

Frank's equilibrium (and that of his friends, the neighbouring shopkeepers, customers and residents) is upset when Ilse Brauchmann, newly arrived in the country, peers into his shop window. A developer seems intent on destroying this little corner of England and Frank galvanises the street into resisting, but is distracted from his campaign by the music lessons he has promised to give this strange but charismatic lady.

Joyce gives the reader a cast of quirky characters, some of whom definitely qualify as eccentric: the alcoholic (but dry) ex-priest who runs the religious gift shop; the teenaged assistant who bubbles with enthusiasm over every project; the bad-tempered tattooist; the hand-holding twin brothers running the funeral parlour; the grumpy waitress in the tea shop; and, of course, Frank, forty, single and living above his music shop, whose very unconventional mother had taught him about music: "…if you listen, the world changes. It's like falling in love. Only no one gets hurt"

Joyce is wonderfully skilled at characters and their interactions, using vignettes to give their backgrounds and anecdotes to illustrate their social ineptitude, their awkward courtship, their miscommunications. There are plenty of wise words: "There is no guarantee that just because you are ready to go back and claim something, it will be there", and there is, obviously, a lot of music, music of all genres, some of which is bound to arouse nostalgia.

For readers of a certain vintage, all sorts of memories will be invoked by this: "You ease the record from its cover. It's years since you've held one but you do it without thinking. Slide your fingers inside the sleeve, careful not to touch the vinyl. Draw it out. Hear the rustle of paper. Balance it in the span of your palm, the outer rim on your thumb, the label on the tip of your middle finger. As it brushes your wrist, feel the soft static kiss of it. Smooth as liquorice and twice as shiny. Light spills over it like water. Breathe in the new smell." Sweet and funny and moving.