After more than 40 years as a successful folk singer-songwriter and sometimes broadcaster, Order of Canada and Canadian Music Hall of Fame honoree Sylvia Tyson has added “novelist” to her list of creative accomplishments.

Billed as a sweeping historical saga, Joyner’s Dream is ambitious – perhaps overly so. Beginning in England in the mid-1800s and ending some 150 years later in Toronto, the fictional family memoir chronicles the lives of the sometimes up, sometimes down Treadwell/Joyner/Fitzhelm clan.

The initial narrator is the family’s youngest scion, Leslie Archibald Fitzhelm. Bequeathed the family history by his recently deceased father Edward (who also voices a chapter), Leslie finds his own circumstances clarified by the lives of his ancestors, all the way back to his fifth-great-grandfather John Joyner. Leslie learns that his forebears, a musically gifted and nimble-fingered lot, routinely turned to alcohol and thievery, and that the bipolar disorder he suffers from has afflicted members of almost every generation before him.

Tyson’s approach is interesting, but the execution is lacklustre and the prose remains flat on the page. And, at more than 400 pages, the book could easily have been relieved of its first four narrators following the prologue and still have covered quite a lot of territory. It is not until the first female narrator, Beth, is introduced after almost 100 pages that the story picks up. Indeed, if Tyson had started the diary with her and relied on Leslie’s later investigations into family history to fill in the details, the story would have been more engaging.

It is admirable that Tyson, now entering her seventies, has chosen to put her reputation on the line with this novel, but the book lacks the finesse that has made her so successful in her other endeavours. A planned companion album may end up being the best part of this foray into literature.