Book Review - The Samplist

Francis Ellen
Ronak Publishing
With accompanying CD
Price: £10.99

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Pesky students. Even the best laid plans for world domination of the nastiest most underhand baddies usually come a cropper through the involvement of a group of underfed, oversexed and underworked youngsters who stick their noses into places where they certainly shouldn't belong. Now, with the release of this hugely entertaining book by Francis Ellen, a group of music students get in on the act as well.

It's a book that put a huge smile on my face when reading it – right from the moment you are introduced to the ubiquitous hero, Alex Stone, and his group of student friends from the fictional Music Academy in Glasgow. It's something of a cross between 'The Young Ones' meet 'I. Robot' with great characters, sublimely bonkers plot and more twists than can be found in the Gruppetto and Mordente studies page of the Arban Tutor. All this and you get to hear them play as well.

Academia has provided writers with a fertile breeding grounds for characters for many a year – right from Rick, Neil, Vivian and the rest of the 'Young Ones' crowd (as fertile a breeding ground for filth and fun as a student fridge) right through to 'Buffy' and her vampire slaying undergraduates; and the ones in 'The Samplist' are brilliantly drawn by a writer who must have had his fair share of grubby student accommodation, rubbish diet, lack of soap and water and the knowledge that they were all along on the wrong course to suit their talents – if they had any talent that is.  Ellen brings to life a disparate group of grotesques that are all too believable and real, and more importantly, will strike a chord with any current or past student in any music establishment – they are grubby, foul mouthed, sexually deviant and lack moral fibre – and that is just the lecture staff.    

Our hero, Alex Stone is a mediocre pianist, but brilliant computer programmer (hence the books title), whilst his trio of friends include Elliot, a genius of a Liverpudlian Chinese guitarist who has the interpersonal skills of proctologist with overlong fingernail (he really is a pain in the bum); Laura, a Spanish violinist who suffers with the equivalent of writers block that can only be relieved with strict rogering administered at the same time she plays, and Skuggs; a parka clad mammoth of a Scottish tuba virtuoso who seems to survive on a diet of beer (his liquid "gas") and the contents of the overdeep pockets of his overcoat (bass players the world over will rejoice and identify with him).  They make Scooby Do, Freddie, Thelma and Shaggy look like a kindergarten playgroup.

Add to this a transvestite College Principal, a lesbian lecturer of computer music and the baddie in the form of a serial fondler of female students breasts and who pines for his ex wife who fed him mince and tatties and you have all the ingredients for a great novel: Charles Dickens would have been hard pressed to better this lot.

The plot revolves around the plan of the quartet of misfits to try and gain retribution and overthrow the baddie (McNabb, the fondler) who has deviously supplanted the Principal after he loses his marbles and starts turning up for work in a Marks and Sparks frock, red shoes and a beard, and who has plans for Academy world domination by getting rid of students he doesn't like (our quartet) and staff (like our lesbian computer lecturer). 

Putting their weird and varied skills together, our group come up with Yang Li, a computer generated musician who through the groups playing skills and the computer brilliance of Alex will be unleashed as the greatest musician the world has ever known – an illegal immigrant from outer Mongolia who has mastered the piano, violin, guitar and tuba to such an extent that he seems to be an amalgam of Horowitz, Menuhin, Segovia and Steve Sykes rolled into one. 

In order to succeed though they must first hoodwink the world greatest recording producer into believing that what he is hearing on the CD is a genius of Mozartian proportions, who also happens to be able to defeat his computer chess game as well – and without spilling the beans, things don't quite go to plan (this where the mind boggling, and quite hilarious plot twists and turns come in). However, in the tradition of the 'Young Ones', all things come to a satisfactory conclusion of sorts.

I haven't enjoyed a book so much for many a year. Francis Ellen has a wicked eye for the absurd; yet there is always a lovely uncomfortable feel that the things he describes are really set in the real world of student life.

And how close indeed, as the novel comes with the CD of performances from the brilliant, yet non-existent Yang Li, on piano, guitar violin and tuba that will get you scratching your head to whether or not they are recordings of real performers or just a very, very clever computer programme. Only the tuba possibly gives the game away as it just sounds too brilliant and has resonance to the timbre that has an edge that doesn't quite fit – its more a cross between a tuba and an edgy bass trombone, whilst the giveaway in the book is that the tuba solo is attributed to Arden's not Arban's 'Carnival of Venice'. 

That is the only the only literally wrong note in the entire book. 'The Samplist' delves wonderfully into a world that teenagers love and parents despair – the world of the student, and provides us with a tremendous read from the top of the stave right down to the last note. Get one for Christmas and squirm in delight – every student performer should have one in their stocking – it may even give them odd ideas of how they can pass their exams by doing as little actual playing as possible. 

Iwan Fox

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