Fifteen in Fifteen: Gillian Cross

5. Gillian Cross

Oh sure, you know exactly what happened in the very beginning. You know and I know and the vicarandthepostmanandthewindowcleaner and the whole WORLD know the story…

The first time I read Chartbreak, I can have been no more than thirteen or fourteen. My other favourite books were King of Shadows by Susan Cooper, Mirror Dreams by Catherine Webb, the Magicians House quartet by William Corlett. I read the books which accompanied the series Charmed to give my brain a rest and seized on every Tamora Pierce with great delight. Eight years and two universities on, Chartbreak is still on my shelves. For anyone worrying, Tamora Pierce is not.

Why Chartbreak? Gillian Cross, of course, is a talented and prolific children’s author, better known for the Demon Headmaster series (which I dimly recall reading, way back in the mists of primary school). Chartbreak is a very different book. It’s one of the few, if not the only, book I’ve read which has been based around the story of a rock band. It has always surprised me that there are so few, as there are some huge advantages in it for an author. The story of a girl running away from home and becoming a lead singer in a rock band, which then goes on to hit the big time, is an instant and obvious rags-to-riches formula, with plenty of real-life precedent. It’s an interesting situation to put characters into, enabling discussion of how their emotions are reflected in their music and vice versa. It allows, even begs for the use of multiple voices and forms of writing, in the form of newspaper cuttings, interviews and letters, all of which can be used to help tell the story. Most importantly, it provides a very tight cast of characters. Chartbreak is based around a band of five, with supporting roles from a manager, a hairdresser, a karate teacher, and a couple of mothers. With an obvious plot and a defined cast, the author can then use her basic material to develop her characters, and introduce complex themes such depression, bereavement, divorce, manipulation, perfectionism, ambition, the difference between image and reality, and a very dark kind of love. And Gillian Cross does so magnificently. There’s very little which is admirable in any of the characters in Chartbreak, but it’s the ways in which they are flawed and broken which make the book what it is.

For anyone who knew me before I was eighteen, the foregoing will have made the effect Chartbreak has had on my life abundantly clear. Every writer has their own great unfinished novel, and mine is a story called 2, based confusingly around the stories of three rock bands, featuring an increasingly sprawling cast of characters, using multiple voices to tell the story, exploring the relationship between the characters and the music they write, and touching on themes such as the importance of honesty over image, grief, bereavement, choice… It says a great deal about the character-driven nature of band stories that 2 manages to be so entirely different to Chartbreak in my mind that I only very recently realised the influence Gillian Cross’s story must have had on it. It is also a sobering reminder of the extent to which what we read can unconsciously inform our ideas and writing styles, however much we believe they are our own. Fellow writers, beware.

When I first read Chartbreak, on a wet Sunday morning when I was still at Warden Park, it hit me like a bombshell. I’d never read anything so dark, so gripping, so full of complex and fascinating and deeply angry characters. Shortly afterwards, I even went as far to review it for a competition, and won a Blue Peter badge for my efforts. That review makes me cringe reading it now, seven years later, but the reasons I picked out for liking Chartbreak then are uncannily similar to the reasons I’d field today, and still none of them manage to quite define why this is a book I will return to again and again. Maybe the answer is that I still can’t find the words to justify my feeling that this is a brilliantly-crafted piece of writing, and a cracking read.

Addendum: The following quote comes when Christie smiles at Finch, in a rehearsal shortly after she joins the band. Her internal response is as follows:

“Oh, I know you’ve read it a million times in tatty paperbacks. He smiled at me and my knees turned to water and I… Well, for God’s sake, how do you describe that feeling?”

Best escape from a cliche I've ever come across.