(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Preview copy provided via NetGalley; Wreck the Halls releases 3 October 2023.
If you have even a passing familiarity with the deluge of festive storytelling that comes our way each and every Christmas season, you will be patently aware of the fact that redemption and second chances are one of the main drivers of any festive narrative.
Perhaps it’s Christmas’s Christian origin or its colourful pagan accretions or simply that things feel a bit more hopeful and possible at this time of year when the day-to-day is dressed up to resemble a brighter, tinsel-y, more pretty version of itself, but whatever the impelling factor, people want stories that warmly advance the idea that even the most broken of people can find wholeness and purpose again.
Tessa Bailey certainly embraces the idea in her addition to the Christmas catalogue, Wreck the Halls, in which the divergent progeny of two ageing rockstars suddenly find themselves tasked with something akin to a seasonal miracle – bringing their warring mothers back together again as the legendary rock duo, Steel Birds, whose music remains deeply entrenched in the cultural landscape and much-loved, and whose reunion would make a lot of people very, very happy.
Not least Applause Productions which proposes to Melody Gallard and Beat Dawkins, the two 30-somethings in question that they each get paid $USD 1 million to engineer this impossible coming together of lead singer Octavia and lead guitarist Trina who shattered their great creative partnership some 30 years earlier, for a concert set to take place, as good and redemptive things do, and must, on Christmas Eve.
‘This is going to be gold,’ Danielle breathed, shoving the cameraman’s shoulder. ‘You keep filming. We can use the footage as promo. You two–keep talking. There has been so much speculation about the Steel Birds break up, but since none of the finer details were ever made public, those details are largely speculation.’
Beat looked down at Melody. She met his eyes, searched them.
How deep were they willing to let people in?
The two siblings end up accepting but for wholly different reasons.
Melody is the shy and retiring, though beautiful, daughter of Trina, a raging hippie-turned-possible-cult-leader, who prefers to spend her days as far away from the spotlight as she can, and who loves restoring YA books back to their original glory.
Melody is still scarred by the excoriating treatment she received at the hands of the press when she was a child and teenager, pilloried at every turn for how she looked, what she wore and that she was not even remotely in the same league as her mother (as if it was some weird contest across the generations).
The only bright spot from that whole period was meeting Octavia’s son, Beat – can you see where the names have a musical resonance, something Bailey owns up to very early in Wreck the Halls, the names being a musical reference to the closeness Beat and Melody enjoy – one day when she was sixteen and realising that he is everything she is not (or at least thinks she is).
Urbane, charming and outgoing with looks to make the most of a winning personality, Beat looks elegantly untroubled by the world into which he was born, his confidence likely the result of two loving parents who gave him the security of family and connection that has long been denied Melody.
(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Theirs is a near-instantaneous connection, a fusing of two people who get each other in a way no one does and no one can; after all, who else in the world knows what it’s like to be the children of Steel Birds?
Alas, this profound sense of knowing each other only last a few hours and then the two instantly lovestruck teens don’t see each other for another fourteen years – quite why is never really explained other than their mothers hate each other so awkward to stay in touch, maybe? – until the deal lands and they reconnect to discover they haven’t stopped things about each other and that there is definitely SOMETHING between them maybe worth pursuing.
As it turns out, if that’s going to happen, it has to be on camera with the big reunion show a live streamed affair that tracks them everywhere they go 14-16 hours a day and which leads to them becoming the absolute obsession of almost everyone on the planet in a way that only viral social media sensations can.
That’s a lot of pressure on two people who are still struggling at the age of 30 to work out who they are apart, who they might be together and whether it’s worth going all that angst and spotlighted attention to try and achieve the impossible.
And Bailey does a good job of representing how weirdly twisted these sorts of undertakings can be, and how even in the most magical of circumstances, Christmas in New York, all the things you’ve suppressed through your life from anxiety about privilege or scarring from being evaluated for looks over substance can come out in ways that you don’t want anyone to know about and certainly not an obsessive public watching your every utterance and move.
Melody wanted her bed.
She wanted her flannel pajamas and her loofa and her secret fruit snacks drawer.
She wanted to go home.
When she’d agreed to Wreck the Halls, she’d decided to take the adventure as it came. Not to worry about the outcome or ruminate over every little decision until she was blue in the face. She’d intended to shatter the walls of her comfort zone. Stir everything up so it would land differently. She wanted a new okay.
And she was feeling the consequences of being reckless now.
Melody is a delight through all of it.
While she may be reticent to be out there and a little afraid of life, it turns an independent, ballsy tiger lies within and on more than one occasion, she does what needs to be done with tenacity, bravery and a sparkling sense of humour imbued in every line of dialogue she utters.
Bailey clearly had fun writing Melody as the boisterously independent butterfly bursting from her introvert cocoon and of the two Melody is the one you want to see do great and amazing things; if she and Beat can get their mums back together, wonderful, what a fairytale ending that will be, but if they don’t, well, you get the feeling Melody is going to be just fine, thank you very much.
The one who doesn’t emerge so well in a story that is engaging and thoughtful when it comes to whether you can fix every broken part of the past and whether you need to even try, is Beat who unfortunately comes across as controlling, overly emotionally intense and prone to infantilising Melody who doesn’t need a big strong man to save her, certainly not someone as irreparably broken as Beat seems to be.
His lingering fallibility and brokenness, meant, you assume ,to show how real and emotionally honest he is – or he can be; Beat, in stark contrast to Melody, has some huge issues and secrets locked away in his existential closet – take a shine off the rom-com that is furiously striving to be a thing, and rather than sighing at the connection between the two, you almost want to urge Melody to run and not come back.
She doesn’t, of course, because this is a Christmas rom-com, with a reunion of estranged parental figures in the offing, and yes, it’s not giving anything away to acknowledge that there is a happy-ever-after waiting for everyone in the novel, but somehow wondrous though much of it is, Wreck the Halls doesn’t quite work as it should, and you’re left wondering just how redemptive this particular festive tale actually ends up being.