Oh Pete, I wish I could get back the time I wasted reading this tripe. Banal and pretentious, and not an enjoyable read. The characters were all shallow and underdeveloped, and the writing was pedestrian at best. Stick to songwriting. ( )

The Age of Anxiety, Pete Townsend’s debut novel (Horse’s Neck, a collection of poems and prose pieces was published in 1985), centres on the artistic struggles and tangled love life of rock star Walter Karel Watts. The intricate, free-ranging story, which features a large cast of characters and covers many years, is narrated by Walter’s godfather, Louis Doxtader, a well-off London dealer of “Outsider Art.” In the 1990s Walter gained fame as front man and chief songwriter of the successful pub band Walter and his Stand. As the novel begins, Louis has been approached by the wife of iconic former rock musician Paul Jackson, of the band Hero Ground Zero. Jackson made himself a notorious footnote in rock history by vanishing from civilized society following a breakdown and adopting the name Nikolai Andréevich after the character he played in a movie. While spending 15 years “living rough” in the woods, Old Nik, as he is currently known, produced a series of drawings and sketches that are in the possession of his wife, and she wants Louis’s opinion on their artistic value (which is considerable, as it turns out). The connection here is that Walter is suffering from aural hallucinations. Louis, having taken Old Nik on as a client, has learned about the visions and hallucinations that triggered his transformation and recurred throughout his years as a recluse, and believes that Nik could offer Walter advice on dealing with his condition, which is worsening. Despite Louis’s and Nik’s intervention however, Walter’s affliction leads to an artistic crisis, and he pulls an Old Nik himself, renouncing the music business, separating from his beautiful wife of many years, Siobhan, marrying Floss, the beautiful best friend of Siobhan’s narcissistic younger sister Selena, and spending the next decade and a half channeling his creative efforts into landscaping. But there are complications, and the past is a reservoir of secrets. Selena, even more beautiful than Siobhan, has always desired Walter. Years earlier, at Siobhan and Walter’s wedding, Selena, still in her teens and serving as a bridesmaid, threw herself at the groom. Floss was also at the wedding. The wedding took place at a time of Louis’s life when he was boozing to excess and both consuming and supplying drugs. While under the influence of drugs given to her by Louis, Floss was assaulted. But by who? Louis suspects he is himself the culprit, but he was so drunk and high he can’t remember what happened. Guilt from this incident has persisted into his advanced years and the book he is writing is intended as a sort of confession. After 15 years away from music, Walter has begun the process of turning his aural phantasms into prose pieces that capture in metaphoric terms the sounds he is hearing. He shows these to Louis, and the prose descriptions eventually make their way to Walter’s father, a classical composer, who produces a series of soundscapes based on Walter’s writings. The resulting concert, billed as Walter’s return to the stage, takes place before an audience of thousands. The novel concludes with a series of revelations about who slept with whom back in the day, and individuals either pair off or return to the separate lives they’ve been living. Townshend has apparently begun the process of turning the book into an opera and art installation. After all, themes of madness, creativity, wayward lust, consuming guilt and secret progeny easily lend themselves to larger-than-life treatment. The soap-opera-ish elements aside, the novel is compelling, and the reader is curious to see the many secrets uncovered and find out how these disclosures affect the lives of the main players. There is no disputing Townshend’s storytelling skills. His descriptive powers are perhaps his greatest strength, especially when it comes to music and extreme states of mind. His prose has a natural flow that carries the reader along. The novel is flawed, but its flaws are those we might expect from a first novel: a rambling, occasionally disjointed plot, weakness in characterization (especially the female characters, who are defined almost exclusively in terms of how attractive they are to the male characters), a reliance on coincidence to move things along, and the occasional descent into melodrama. But the fact remains that Pete Townshend at 75 is still producing work that is interesting, ambitious and worthy of serious attention. That fact alone is to be celebrated. ( )