In the Falling Snow by Caryl Phillips Page A

new tonal flexibility to his voice. One can sense both pain and elation co-existing in a raw and vulnerable fashion, whereas loyalty to the group had previously reduced his voice to harmonic decoration.’ Would he really learn anything new by listening to this song for a fourth time?
    He checks his email. Ruth wants to know if he will be attending a disability workshop in Milton Keynes next month because, if so, she will have to book a hotel room for she’s heard that the non-smoking doubles are going fast. There are two emails from Annabelle, who is clearly still annoyed that he hasn’t made time to meet her and have the ‘urgent’ talk about Laurie’s behaviour, but in the meantime she wants to know if he is coming to parents’ evening. Her second message, somewhat sarcastically, reminds him of the date of parents’ evening. He clicks out of his email account without answering and pulls up the chapter headings and wonders if he should reconfigure the structure of the book. Maybe this will get him started. During the course of the past week the book has shrunk in scope as he abandoned the chapter to do with gospel music, and then the one about the blues, having finally admitted that he knows precious little about either genre. With regard to jazz, he agonised and wondered if it was even possible to write a book about contemporary music without including something about this tradition, but he finally convinced himself that there were already hundreds of respectable volumes on the subject and, quite frankly, he didn’t need the hassle of adding his opinions into the mix for even the most level-headed people tended to become either very defensive, or unusually aggressive, when explaining their convictions about jazz.
    He is now contemplating a three-part study of the music of the sixties, the seventies and the eighties. The first part of the book, ‘Motown and the Suburbs’, will specifically concern itself with soul music, the middle section, ‘Rebel Music,’ will address itself to the rise of reggae as a global phenomenon, and the final third of the book ‘Whose World?’ will look at the implications, musically and culturally, of the emergence of so-called ‘World Music’. This new structure seems more manageable to him, but he still has the problem of not being entirely sure of how one actually starts to write a book. He wonders if this is what people mean when they talk about having writer’s block, but he quickly reminds himself that, up until this extended research break, he has had little chance to seriously address himself to the project, having had to be content to snatch writing time at weekends, or on bank holidays. Annabelle often consoled her husband by telling him that his responsibilities at work meant that he obviously did not have enough free time to do anything other than simply plan a book, and he should not be so hard on himself. In her less supportive moments, his exasperated wife would point out that if he really wanted to write then he should stop bleating and just get on and do it, but within the hour she would be apologising and literally, and metaphorically, stroking his back and encouraging him to keep trying. For his part, he remains undecided whether or not the issue really is time, or if he fundamentally lacks motivation. Conjuring with the idea of writer’s block is a new option, and while he remains tempted by the ease with which he might claim to be afflicted with this malady, the more rational part of him is fully aware that in order to be stricken with this condition he would first have to be able to provide tangible evidence that he has gone beyond the planning stage and actually written something.
    The local library is undeniably dingy. People toting heavy shopping bags often step inside its vaulted entry hall simply to shelter from the rain, and stubborn local vagrants have to be regularly ushered out and back on to the street. In the centre of the reading room are two