By Gregory MacNamee THE TIME IS the near future, the place a decrepit England under the total control of a faceless, benign dictatorship called The Corporation. A 19-year-old employee, by virtue of having earned a decent grade in a course on the 1960s, is assigned to ghostwrite the memoir of a curmudgeonly survivor of the time: Ray Davies, the faintly sinister leader of the "beat group" The Kinks, whose youthful antics caused one concert promoter to plead, "Why can't you be good boys, like the Rolling Stones?" Davies, our fictional narrator learns, turns out to be no easy subject, "pious and patronizing" in his long-winded replies. Still, he turns out to be one of the "last innocents" in an artless world of mass production and soulless drum machines. Woven into the standard rock-star confessional, replete with its tales of pills, reel-to-reel wonkery, tawdry sex, and corporate attorneys, lies a raft of witty social criticism, much of it right on the mark. Davies takes the opportunity to float a few familiar complaints, especially his long-standing charge that The Who ripped off his sound; he also knocks conformity, consumerist monoculture, the Information Age, and the decline and fall of the comfortable England of Sunday teas, sunny afternoons and baked beans on toast, a loss that has preoccupied Davies for decades and fueled albums like The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur. There are a few technical asides on fuzz and feedback for the air guitarists in the audience, a few obligatory digs at Yanks, a few tales of rock-and-roll debauchery. We even learn the twisted story behind Davies' signature song "Lola"--if, that is, we can trust our source, who warns us that what he has to say may or may not be true at any given turn. Dreams float in and out of this shapeshifting book, dreams of music and freedom and cyberia and sex, dreams of a past that probably never existed. Dedicated followers of The Kinks and of dystopian writing alike will find much in these dark, edgy pages.

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