Clio had everything to break into music. And then nothing. The novel of thirty years of British disillusions through a short life.
by Denis Cosnard
The first page, a copy of an article from 1990, presents Clio Campbell during his quarter of an hour of glory. She is 23 years old. As she performs her very recent success, Rise Up, in the star “Top of the Pops”, the Scottish unbutton her vest and, “in defiance of all the rules of decency”, reveals a tight t-shirt Struck with a slogan against the Poll Tax, the new tax signed Thatcher. “It looks like Clio Campbell is ready to do battle,” concludes the journalist. On the next page, the singer dropped. Her friend Ruth has just found her in the room she was lending to her, surrounded by gifts offered for her 50th anniversary. Besides her, a residue of crushed pills and a vodka carafe. His heart will never be beating again.
What happened in twenty-seven years so that the former rising star of British folk has chosen to finish it? This is the whole object of one day, the second fairly stunning novel by the Scottish Kirsty Innes, and its first translated into French. A book like this fiction singer: flamboyant, complex, festive and dramatic, intimate and political at the same time, excessive, a little damn but extremely endearing.
To solve the enigma, the novelist (born in Edinburgh in 1980) proceeds as in one of these old Agatha Christie that Clio Pick in the library of a friend, one day when she has an urgent need to clear the head. Kirstin Innes makes those who have known her heroine in turn: her friends, her parents, her husband, some ex, various makeshift or galley companions. About fifteen people in total. Everyone delivers fragments of the woman he has frequented, their family, love, music, combat stories.
“All kinds of facets”
Obviously, everything does not overlap. To each his clio. “Human beings have all kinds of facets, don’t you think?” Observes one of the characters at the end of the novel. The words of each other nevertheless end up assembling enough to draw a triple portrait, increasingly rich over the pages. The one, first of all, of Clio, this rebellious singer, “a force of nature, exasperating, impulsive, totally devoid of humor, which changed its mind every five minutes, never did what she had said, Who took you and threw you if and when she needed you “, like Croque Neil, a journalist for a time close to her. “And damn, what did I love him,” he adds …
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