Richard by Ben Myers

Once upon a time, if you were a pop/rock/soul/country music star at the peak of your career, it wasn’t really a very good idea to go anywhere on an aeroplane. Then came an age where over indulgence in Drugs seemed to wipe out most of the bright young things in their prime.

And then, the 90′s, where suicide was chic. Apart from Kurt Cobain, the most infamous cause of grief to my cohorts was the disappearance of ‘Richey Manic’ from the Manic Street Preachers. Taking into account that his car was found abandoned near to the Severn Bridge, he had recently spent spells in rehab for alcohol abuse and eating disorders, and he was well known to self harm – most people drew the conclusion that he ended his own life by jumping from the bridge.

However, the fact that his car was only found two weeks after he went missing, plus some reliable eye witnesses who saw him in South Wales in the intervening days, and the fact that his body was never found, lends this mightily sad story a small ray of hope. Maybe he just wanted to get out of the public eye and live a peaceful life away from it all. Ben Myers’ novel covers ‘what might have happened’ and takes us on a road between the two possible outcomes.

Richard is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Richard Edwards, founding member of the Manic Street Preachers, who went missing in early 1995, and was declared legally dead in 2008. By all accounts, he was an introverted character, prone to depression, and mentally unstable. Tragically, he disappeared just before the Manics hit the big time with their fourth album, Everything Must Go.

How to inhabit this material, and bring it off on the page, of course, is quite the challenge. The terms are stated early in the novel, like a proposal in a school science essay: ‘the human mind continuously edits and self-censors. It writes its own history and romanticizes event in order to make sense of a life’.

Romanticizing is not something Myers goes in for, and more to his credit. When you deal with the lives of people in extreme situations – soldiers, rock stars, and addicts – the day to day things make the best copy. If they don’t quite compensate for all the repetitive, inward focus (the novel’s nearly all interior monologue, speedily delivered), they bring home the reality of the rock star’s life.

In the novel’s occasionally heedless pace blurs things, there are moments of lucidity. They come through Richard’s monologue like rocks through thawing snow. Welsh, he openly admits, is a language only kept alive by people who can also speak English. But he’s genuinely passionate about the sound of a Welsh choir, feeling it surpasses anything he or the band will ever produce. The novel’s moral lesson is gleaned from the R.S. Thomas poem ‘Welsh Landscape’. Blaming others is useless: ‘we must all be accountable for our actions; without culpability we are inhumane’.

A must for Manics fans as it’s a tasteful exploration of what is a painful time for many of them, plus the band and his family. A good read also for music fans, or anyone else interested in the reasons people chose to run away. The novel is a bumpy, undisciplined affair, with all the traditional flaws and strengths of apprentice fiction. But I would like to see more from its author, and hope time will sift out the impurities in his next effort.

Richard; Myers, Ben; Picador; $13.94