What if Mick Jagger had
gone into politics like his mother wanted? What if John Lennon had
gotten a job on the Liverpool docks after returning from Hamburg?
And just where did Pete Townsend and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters get
their dark visions of adolescence and childhood anyway?
The answers might look something like E. David Moulton's Prodigal Child, the story about a child from England's post-war generation. Moulton gives us the life of Eddie Conner, the son of a war veteran and dockworker. Eddie's life is shaped first by the Blitz, then his family's flight from it to rural England, then by his abusive father. During the war, Eddie meets the one man whose words will shape the way Eddie sees the world far more than even his bar-brawling dad. While staying in the country (away from the bombs and nightly escapes to London's Underground), Eddie befriends an American soldier he only knows as Running Horse. Running Horse is a Navajo Indian and wood carver. Young Eddie asks him how to carve something from wood. Running Horse says, "I do not need to show you how; the Spirit will show you if you let it."
It is this one line that defines Eddie Conner's dreams and dictates how he faces adversity. The Spirit of Creativity, as Running Horse calls it in the days leading up to D-Day, carries Eddie from the streets of London's East End into the choir at St. Paul's Cathedral, from running wild with his buddy George, an aspiring thief whose father is a bookie, to the London club scene, where he discovers a talent for something called "rock and roll." Rock and roll, it seems, that is Eddie's destiny. His band becomes wildly popular, enough to be featured on the BBC and attract a record contract.
Fate intervenes, however, when Eddie is attacked and seriously injures one of his attackers. While it's clearly a case of self-defense, Eddie's violent history and some damming testimony condemn him to prison for three years, starting in 1961. From his cell, he watches the Beatles and the Rolling Stones skyrocket to success. By the time Eddie is released, it's too late. The British Invasion is underway, and stardom has passed him by.
From then on, Prodigal Child tells how Eddie capitalizes on his creativity first to get through prison, then to start a career as a sculptor, and finally to become a successful businessman in both England and America. Fate slaps him down more than once. In England, his marriage withers away, and in America, his second wife betrays him by getting in trouble with the law not once, but twice. It's the second time, with Eddie himself facing charges, that destroys the marriage for good.
Yet each time, Eddie thinks back to Running Horse and remembers how he dealt with the previous setback. Eventually, Eddie comes full circle, drifting back into music and finding some of the success he missed in the early sixties. It's at this point the story actually begins, with Eddie talking to a reporter from Rolling Stone.
The meat of this book is England and the fifties and sixties for Eddie. It's here you learn first hand why albums like Quadrophenia and The Wall are so dark, and where a lot of their references to the post-war era come from. Eddie Conner is a peer of those musicians, though he can't seem to escape London's East End, except through prison.
If the story ended with Conner's marriage to a coworker and his success as a sculptor, Prodigal Child would be one of the best novels of 2003. On the downside, that would have also made it one of the shortest. Unfortunately, when Moulton moves his protagonist to America, the story seems to rush by at a dizzying pace. We watch Conner go through a midlife crisis, buying a fancy house and a Porsche and marrying a young actress, but those years come off as sketched, really. I would have liked to have seen either more of what happened or simply have Conner pick up as his second marriage fails, backfilling details as events unfold. Told in a more linear fashion, as Moulton does here, the book loses some of the energy that makes the first half of the book.
Still, the book is written to sound like an autobiography, and in a way, maybe it is. On the book's jacket, Moulton's bio parallels Eddie Conner's in many respects, although there's no mention of prison time. Moulton is also a child of Britain's postwar generation and a musician in his own right. Like Conner, Moulton's had more than one career in a winding path that's taken him from London to the north of England to Los Angeles. Had the book gone on for another couple of chapters, I would not have been surprised to see "writer" added to Conner's resume. Certainly, Moulton is a natural, writing about England for an American audience. There's not a hint of condescension or cross-cultural gaffes that usually hamper efforts that cross between two cultures. Moulton neither assumes his audience will understand everything about his childhood environment nor does he treat them as ignorant. His explanations are part of the imagery and the setting. It's just as easy to get to know his East End or Sheffield as it is to see Southern California and the Arizona desert.
Prodigal Child is a terrific literary work. The insight on a generation of Britons and how one man moved easily from one culture to another makes for fascinating reading. And, for an old Brit rock buff like myself, it's an eye-opener on what was behind the soundtrack to my early adult life.
The answers might look something like E. David Moulton's Prodigal Child, the story about a child from England's post-war generation. Moulton gives us the life of Eddie Conner, the son of a war veteran and dockworker. Eddie's life is shaped first by the Blitz, then his family's flight from it to rural England, then by his abusive father. During the war, Eddie meets the one man whose words will shape the way Eddie sees the world far more than even his bar-brawling dad. While staying in the country (away from the bombs and nightly escapes to London's Underground), Eddie befriends an American soldier he only knows as Running Horse. Running Horse is a Navajo Indian and wood carver. Young Eddie asks him how to carve something from wood. Running Horse says, "I do not need to show you how; the Spirit will show you if you let it."
It is this one line that defines Eddie Conner's dreams and dictates how he faces adversity. The Spirit of Creativity, as Running Horse calls it in the days leading up to D-Day, carries Eddie from the streets of London's East End into the choir at St. Paul's Cathedral, from running wild with his buddy George, an aspiring thief whose father is a bookie, to the London club scene, where he discovers a talent for something called "rock and roll." Rock and roll, it seems, that is Eddie's destiny. His band becomes wildly popular, enough to be featured on the BBC and attract a record contract.
Fate intervenes, however, when Eddie is attacked and seriously injures one of his attackers. While it's clearly a case of self-defense, Eddie's violent history and some damming testimony condemn him to prison for three years, starting in 1961. From his cell, he watches the Beatles and the Rolling Stones skyrocket to success. By the time Eddie is released, it's too late. The British Invasion is underway, and stardom has passed him by.
From then on, Prodigal Child tells how Eddie capitalizes on his creativity first to get through prison, then to start a career as a sculptor, and finally to become a successful businessman in both England and America. Fate slaps him down more than once. In England, his marriage withers away, and in America, his second wife betrays him by getting in trouble with the law not once, but twice. It's the second time, with Eddie himself facing charges, that destroys the marriage for good.
Yet each time, Eddie thinks back to Running Horse and remembers how he dealt with the previous setback. Eventually, Eddie comes full circle, drifting back into music and finding some of the success he missed in the early sixties. It's at this point the story actually begins, with Eddie talking to a reporter from Rolling Stone.
The meat of this book is England and the fifties and sixties for Eddie. It's here you learn first hand why albums like Quadrophenia and The Wall are so dark, and where a lot of their references to the post-war era come from. Eddie Conner is a peer of those musicians, though he can't seem to escape London's East End, except through prison.
If the story ended with Conner's marriage to a coworker and his success as a sculptor, Prodigal Child would be one of the best novels of 2003. On the downside, that would have also made it one of the shortest. Unfortunately, when Moulton moves his protagonist to America, the story seems to rush by at a dizzying pace. We watch Conner go through a midlife crisis, buying a fancy house and a Porsche and marrying a young actress, but those years come off as sketched, really. I would have liked to have seen either more of what happened or simply have Conner pick up as his second marriage fails, backfilling details as events unfold. Told in a more linear fashion, as Moulton does here, the book loses some of the energy that makes the first half of the book.
Still, the book is written to sound like an autobiography, and in a way, maybe it is. On the book's jacket, Moulton's bio parallels Eddie Conner's in many respects, although there's no mention of prison time. Moulton is also a child of Britain's postwar generation and a musician in his own right. Like Conner, Moulton's had more than one career in a winding path that's taken him from London to the north of England to Los Angeles. Had the book gone on for another couple of chapters, I would not have been surprised to see "writer" added to Conner's resume. Certainly, Moulton is a natural, writing about England for an American audience. There's not a hint of condescension or cross-cultural gaffes that usually hamper efforts that cross between two cultures. Moulton neither assumes his audience will understand everything about his childhood environment nor does he treat them as ignorant. His explanations are part of the imagery and the setting. It's just as easy to get to know his East End or Sheffield as it is to see Southern California and the Arizona desert.
Prodigal Child is a terrific literary work. The insight on a generation of Britons and how one man moved easily from one culture to another makes for fascinating reading. And, for an old Brit rock buff like myself, it's an eye-opener on what was behind the soundtrack to my early adult life.
Child’s
Play
Local writer E. David Moulton pens a compelling novel-as-memoir with Prodigal Child
Local author E. David Moulton’s Prodigal Child is an economical account of a wasteful albeit not wasted life. The title, which extends from the name of the narrator’s band, stems from his seemingly misspent youth and adulthood.
Curiously, the 272-page novel isn’t as lavish and undisciplined as its protagonist, as it manages to be seductive and non-romantic at the same time. That is, the novel captivates from the beginning with its rich but at the same time spare writing. The storyline is delectably winding, but Moulton’s diction and style remain direct and unornamented. It’s refreshing to read someone who doesn’t spend more than a small paragraph describing someone’s physical characteristics or use two pages to convey the various color schemes and components of a house. The British-born author would have been better served, however, developing the romantic relationships and evoking romantic imagery from the events, as the storyline lent itself to a more lyrical dance of words.
Prodigal Child is loosely based on the life of Moulton, who moved to Charleston after spending many years in Los Angeles as a songwriter. That career followed a decade plus working as a builder and designer of racing bikes, an art form he has written extensively about. The narrator, Eddie Conner, is a Brit whose life entertains a certain biblical Job quality. The novel follows his seemingly countless hardships and missteps without sermonizing, however. The book would make for excellent philosophical discourse at a college — each student would have to decide whether Eddie is a tragic character, in that he has endlessly bad luck or is simply stupid. A person could make the case that he is morally culpable. After all, Eddie is a free agent and therefore able to chart a path clear of so many seemingly irresistible stimuli.
Okay, here’s Eddie. The guy endures the Blitzkrieg of Word War II as a pre-adolescent, grows up on the hardscrabble East London streets and learns to answer problems with fistic requital. Meanwhile, he deals with a father who is a drunken, abusive, and stereotypically broken war veteran. Eddie seems to regard female companions as an afterthought and consequently ends up always estranged from them. For all his faults, he does possess numerous gifts — singing, songwriting, welding, and manufacturing — and excels at everything he takes up. Meanwhile, he keeps getting arrested. Whether as an adolescent, a teenager, a young adult in England, or as an aging businessman in California, he gets in trouble with the law. Part of the pathos of the story is how his burgeoning rock-and-roll career in the early ’60s derails because of a five-year prison term for a retaliatory, but unproven as such, maiming of another young man. He sees the rise of the Rolling Stones and Beatles and wonders if that could have been his lot. He remains wistful for the longest time but finally gets around to pursue the rock siren’s call as a 40-something man.
The story opens with the more aged Eddie as a developing rock star being interviewed by a Rolling Stone reporter. I feared at that point that the first-person narrative would lapse into tired Interview with the Vampire territory, where the balance of the novel is recounted to the scribe. Fortunately, Moulton proved tellingly creative here. The novel represents what the fledgling rock star wouldn’t tell the reporter. Existentially so, Eddie’s music is definitely informed and sustained by his numerous fights and travails; however, he opted not to avail the rock journalist of this information. And in a neatly circular fashion, the novel ends where it begins, and the reader is all the wiser about the mean-spiritedness and hesitancy he reflected in the opening pages.
Another dividend gleaned from the novel is learning about the evolution of rock and roll, and the class distinctions that went along with it. Each class in England had its particular musical passion. This ties in well with another of the book’s attributes, the idiomatic spray of the various British characters. Without being annoyingly persistent in recording the idiom as current Southern writers do, Moulton showcases to digestible degree the vagaries of the Cockney dialect. When a Cockney wants you to abandon your current train of thought or action, he says "leave it out." We also learn that "starving" means one thing in London and another in other parts of England.
The chief theme in Prodigal Child is how different people deal with different setbacks. If the author had even half the things happen to him that occurred in the novel, then I have a very sympathetic handshake to extend. And then I would ask him if he kept getting into trouble and didn’t really drink, why didn’t he try to stand things on their head and begin drinking more? Or maybe I would just congratulate him on an attention-grabbing story that reads clean and easy.
Local writer E. David Moulton pens a compelling novel-as-memoir with Prodigal Child
Local author E. David Moulton’s Prodigal Child is an economical account of a wasteful albeit not wasted life. The title, which extends from the name of the narrator’s band, stems from his seemingly misspent youth and adulthood.
Curiously, the 272-page novel isn’t as lavish and undisciplined as its protagonist, as it manages to be seductive and non-romantic at the same time. That is, the novel captivates from the beginning with its rich but at the same time spare writing. The storyline is delectably winding, but Moulton’s diction and style remain direct and unornamented. It’s refreshing to read someone who doesn’t spend more than a small paragraph describing someone’s physical characteristics or use two pages to convey the various color schemes and components of a house. The British-born author would have been better served, however, developing the romantic relationships and evoking romantic imagery from the events, as the storyline lent itself to a more lyrical dance of words.
Prodigal Child is loosely based on the life of Moulton, who moved to Charleston after spending many years in Los Angeles as a songwriter. That career followed a decade plus working as a builder and designer of racing bikes, an art form he has written extensively about. The narrator, Eddie Conner, is a Brit whose life entertains a certain biblical Job quality. The novel follows his seemingly countless hardships and missteps without sermonizing, however. The book would make for excellent philosophical discourse at a college — each student would have to decide whether Eddie is a tragic character, in that he has endlessly bad luck or is simply stupid. A person could make the case that he is morally culpable. After all, Eddie is a free agent and therefore able to chart a path clear of so many seemingly irresistible stimuli.
Okay, here’s Eddie. The guy endures the Blitzkrieg of Word War II as a pre-adolescent, grows up on the hardscrabble East London streets and learns to answer problems with fistic requital. Meanwhile, he deals with a father who is a drunken, abusive, and stereotypically broken war veteran. Eddie seems to regard female companions as an afterthought and consequently ends up always estranged from them. For all his faults, he does possess numerous gifts — singing, songwriting, welding, and manufacturing — and excels at everything he takes up. Meanwhile, he keeps getting arrested. Whether as an adolescent, a teenager, a young adult in England, or as an aging businessman in California, he gets in trouble with the law. Part of the pathos of the story is how his burgeoning rock-and-roll career in the early ’60s derails because of a five-year prison term for a retaliatory, but unproven as such, maiming of another young man. He sees the rise of the Rolling Stones and Beatles and wonders if that could have been his lot. He remains wistful for the longest time but finally gets around to pursue the rock siren’s call as a 40-something man.
The story opens with the more aged Eddie as a developing rock star being interviewed by a Rolling Stone reporter. I feared at that point that the first-person narrative would lapse into tired Interview with the Vampire territory, where the balance of the novel is recounted to the scribe. Fortunately, Moulton proved tellingly creative here. The novel represents what the fledgling rock star wouldn’t tell the reporter. Existentially so, Eddie’s music is definitely informed and sustained by his numerous fights and travails; however, he opted not to avail the rock journalist of this information. And in a neatly circular fashion, the novel ends where it begins, and the reader is all the wiser about the mean-spiritedness and hesitancy he reflected in the opening pages.
Another dividend gleaned from the novel is learning about the evolution of rock and roll, and the class distinctions that went along with it. Each class in England had its particular musical passion. This ties in well with another of the book’s attributes, the idiomatic spray of the various British characters. Without being annoyingly persistent in recording the idiom as current Southern writers do, Moulton showcases to digestible degree the vagaries of the Cockney dialect. When a Cockney wants you to abandon your current train of thought or action, he says "leave it out." We also learn that "starving" means one thing in London and another in other parts of England.
The chief theme in Prodigal Child is how different people deal with different setbacks. If the author had even half the things happen to him that occurred in the novel, then I have a very sympathetic handshake to extend. And then I would ask him if he kept getting into trouble and didn’t really drink, why didn’t he try to stand things on their head and begin drinking more? Or maybe I would just congratulate him on an attention-grabbing story that reads clean and easy.
