Piece of My Heart - Novel by Peter Robinson

[StoneMtn]

May 7, 2006. 01:00 AM

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Piece of My Heart

by Peter Robinson

McClelland & Stewart,

384 pages, $34.99

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It's too bad Peter Robinson couldn't get to the rock festival at Varsity Stadium in September, 1969. Robinson, the author of the absorbing series of crime novels featuring Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire cops, is known for fitting music of all kinds into the plots of his books. Banks knows his way around every musical style and in each novel the background sounds, which sometimes hint at clues, are likely to include people as varied as Thelonious Monk, Edvard Greig and Bob Marley.

But in the latest Banks novel, Piece of My Heart, the plot puts the inspector's focus on one genre of music in one specific period. This time, Banks is drawn to the rock bands of 1969 and to the festivals like the one at Varsity Stadium that became a sudden phenomenon on the rock scene that year.

The 1969 festival at the centre of the book is fictional and minor, attracting 25,000 fans to a field in remote Yorkshire to listen to bands Robinson has mostly invented for the occasion. But as background and atmosphere, Robinson brings to the narrative atmospheric material about the year's real and storied festivals.

He writes, somewhat enviously, about Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park, not to mention Varsity Stadium in Toronto. Robinson's wistful tone seems a giveaway that his evocation of the age of festivals comes mostly at second hand. Certainly he wasn't around for the Toronto festival since he was 19 at the time, living at home in England, long before he moved to Canada.

I was at Varsity Stadium that Saturday in September for all 14 hours of the music as the reviewer for a Toronto newspaper. What I remember most are performances that seem now more like fiction than rock reality. Alice Cooper finished his set by hurling live chickens into the audience. Since thrown birds don't travel far, the chickens plummeted into the press section in front of the stage. The city's finest pop journalists panicked and scattered.

Yoko Ono, in a set with John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band later in the afternoon, presented herself from inside a large cloth bag, emitting squawks that reminded people of Alice Cooper's chickens. Little Richard broke a piano, and it was of no help to the poor instrument that Little Richard was followed by Fats Domino. Late at night, an uncharacteristically sober Jim Morrison summed up the event with droning vocals of the Doors' anthems about the end of the world.

While the 1969 festival in Robinson's book offers none of these treats, it has the advantage of a murder. The story to Piece of My Heart operates in two alternating time periods, 1969 and 2005, each with a murder and each with a different sleuth figure. It's apparent early on that the two murders are linked by their relationships to the same rock band, but the plot leads readers to suspect that a deeper and creepier factor may also connect the killings.

The first victim, at the 1969 festival, is an 18-year-old girl mysteriously stabbed to death in the dark while Led Zeppelin is playing on stage. The girl is a cousin of the pianist in the Mad Hatters, a promising young Yorkshire band that performed earlier in the evening, and it's the Mad Hatters that bring the victim of the 2005 murder into the loop of associations.

This second dead person is a 38-year-old rock journalist; someone wielding a poker has whacked him over the head in a house not far from the scene of the old festival. Not coincidentally, the journalist is nosing into the story of the Mad Hatters. The band, as long-lasting as the Stones, remains a major item on the 21st century rock circuit, but the journalist was working on the idea that something ghastly still lingers from the Mad Hatters' past.

In earlier Banks novels, Robinson has used the technique of playing off ancient events against present-day crimes, and he's smooth at it. This time, he gets even more mileage out of the device by contrasting both the murders and the policemen whose jobs are to solve them.

The inspector on the 1969 case was a stern copper who loathed rock and the sex, dope and bell-bottom pants that went with it. Alan Banks in 2005, on the other hand, stays open to everything musical from Beethoven to Snoop Dogg, and the differing attitudes of the two inspectors raise questions about the solutions to both murders.

Did the first policeman's hostility to rock colour his decision about who killed the girl? Did he get his sleuthing all wrong? And does the result complicate the investigation that the more culturally generous Banks conducts into the rock journalist's murder almost 40 years later?

All of this is tantalizing stuff, but the plot works only because Robinson does such a skilful job of evoking 1969 — peace, drugs and free love, the Manson family, My Lai and Kent State, the Hells Angels knifing to death the black man at Altamont, and Mick Jagger letting loose the butterflies in Hyde Park in memory of the recently drowned Brian Jones.

Robinson appears not to have missed a significant moment — except maybe the Saturday afternoon when Alice Cooper flung the live chickens into press row at Varsity Stadium.

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