Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F Ross
| Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F Ross | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Stephen Leach
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| Summary: An era-spanning tale brilliantly weaving together the lives of a handful of interconnected characters from the 80s to the present day. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: December 2022 |
| Publisher: Orenda Books | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1914585401 | |
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I reviewed David F Ross's book There's Only One Danny Garvey a couple of years back and remember being absolutely floored by how powerful and affecting it was. It was a gripping, emotionally wounding read, and rereading my review of it my main takeaway was that I might not have lavished enough praise on it.
So I was immediately interested in reading Dashboard Elvis is Dead, expecting good things once again. I'm a sucker for an ambitious premise as well as those which reflect on real-life political and historical events, and this promised and delivered both. It's a story set across the lifetimes of a handful of interconnected characters, detailing skilfully how their lives cross and in unexpected ways.
It initially seems like a slow, insular narrative more concerned with exploring the mindset of the characters than the events that got them there. Starting in the (almost) present-day, it then abruptly speeds back across the decades in order to fully tell the story of the major players, chiefly Jude and Jamie – one a successful photographer, the other a disgraced musician. The story slips from one to the other and between time periods, following Jude's desperate attempt to track down her absent father and Jamie – a somewhat less likeable but no less compelling figure – as he aims for fame but rapidly finds himself unprepared for it, his band's tour ending in disaster. Both arcs are powerfully written and quietly devastating but it's Jude, more than any other, who experiences the heaviest loss as she travels across America and across the Atlantic, her search leading her up to the events of the independence referendum and across the path of a politician determined to become Scotland's first minister. There's not even a moment of glamour here – Ross seems to revel in painting a portrait of the very bottom of society, a place rife with poverty, violence, and depravity.
The journeys of the characters move swiftly across America and Scotland, often brushing up against some of the major events (and real people) of the past forty years. Quite deliberately I'm sure, it's written in a way that often feels more like reported history or true crime than straightforward fiction, and Ross even leans into this idea very cunningly by including himself as a character in the narrative who tries to write about Jamie's band. On paper I've never liked this idea; it felt indulgent when Stephen King did it, and it still does in theory. Similarly to King's portrayal, however, Ross wryly portrays himself in very unflattering terms, which makes it just amusing enough to bear. And all of these stories are weaved neatly into one bigger picture – a bigger history, it feels like, since you almost feel as though this really happened. It's transfixing and feels authentic and well-observed and I almost couldn't stop myself from being swept up in it.
For all that I'm making it sound so epic, it's surprisingly short for all that – only 340 pages. Yet so much is packed in that it feels like more. It caused me to ponder the extent to which chance meetings and small decisions affect the course of a life, and to what extent we as individual players can shape the course of history.
Reading Dashboard Elvis is Dead made me feel dwarfed for multiple reasons. It's a stunning and absolutely masterful piece of fiction, and it's one of those books you finish and bitterly wish you'd written yourself. As the first book I read in 2023 it's set the bar high indeed.
Obviously, Ross's previous book There's Only One Danny Garvey is one I'd recommend after this. For a similarly ambitious story that covers a wide period of both space and time and charts the history of a disparate family group, I can also highly recommend Douglas Kennedy's The Great Wide Open – a history-spanning pastiche of the great American novel.
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