An Equal Music - Vikram Seth

...Because they do have an effect outside the book – the very best novels can make us want to cry, jump for joy, hold our breath in anticipation… For a short time we are no longer the Reader, we are the protagonist of the novel. In short, we believe, or at least we suspend disbelief.

If we make up a story when being interrogated by the police, we’re in trouble. If we use a made-up story as a witness in court it’s called Perjury. And if ...
...If they are told from an early age that they are worthless, they hold that belief for ever after in the face of all evidence to the contrary. According to my friend, they need to retell those early stories to themselves with a different ending, to redress the balance (it can be done with hypnosis).

So the novel works on the subconscious mind, which regards it as “real” and synthesises the emotions by way of response. The extent to ... more

***** Preamble: The Novel *****

The Novel just has to be one of the strangest as well as one of the most noble of human creations. Think about it. A book written about people who don’t and never did exist (I generalise, of course), “living” non-existent lives and “doing” things that have no effect outside the book…

Ah, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Because they do have an effect outside the book – the very best novels can make us want to cry, jump for joy, hold our breath in anticipation… For a short time we are no longer the Reader, we are the protagonist of the novel. In short, we believe, or at least we suspend disbelief.

If we make up a story when being interrogated by the police, we’re in trouble. If we use a made-up story as a witness in court it’s called Perjury. And if we make up a story to cover our tracks during a love affair, it’s called Lying. But if we write a whole book out of a made-up story it’s called a Novel and the author can become a celebrated household name. Strange, isn’t it?

I’ve often wondered how I can get swept up in a novel to the extent that I worry about a character even between readings and I think I’m beginning to understand the process. A friend of mine who is a “life coach” explained how the subconscious mind cannot distinguish truth from fiction. That’s why some people suffer from low self-esteem. If they are told from an early age that they are worthless, they hold that belief for ever after in the face of all evidence to the contrary. According to my friend, they need to retell those early stories to themselves with a different ending, to redress the balance (it can be done with hypnosis).

So the novel works on the subconscious mind, which regards it as “real” and synthesises the emotions by way of response. The extent to which this works is a measure of the skill of the writer. And Vikram Seth is a writer of exceptional skill.

***** First Encounter *****

I first encountered An Equal Music when we visited my brother, who was treating Mrs Floon and me to a couple of concert tickets to hear the Lindsay String Quartet at Leamington Spa to celebrate my good lady’s birthday. One of the works played was the sublime String Quintet by Schubert (see my review halfway down page 2) and my brother later pulled out a copy of this book and said he thought the Quintet was mentioned in the novel. He thought I might enjoy reading it and passed it over to me. I took it home, more out of politeness if I’m honest: as a reader of science fiction and Terry Pratchett I just didn’t think this would be my kind of book.

It sat on my bookshelf until May of this year, a full year later, when I wandered into the Big W store in Newark, to be confronted by a sale of CDs. Among them was a cover I recognised as being the same as the cover of the book and claiming to contain all the music mentioned in the book. At £2.99 for a double album it was too good to miss; and when I found out that it contained a hitherto unrecorded work by Beethoven, I just had to read the novel to find out more about it.

***** The Plot *****

As plots go, on the surface this one is fairly conventional: boy meets girl before the story starts, loses her, finds her again to discover she’s married and has an affair with her…

But that’s the view through the wrong end of a telescope. Turning it round we encounter Michael Holme, a violinist through whose eyes the story is filtered. He is still recovering from a love affair that ended ten years ago in Vienna; he had walked away from his lover, fellow music student Julia, because he could no longer bring himself to stay in Vienna studying with the bullying professor of violin. He returned to England and did not contact her again. Now, living alone in London, a member of a successful sting quartet, he is having a casual affair with a young French music student, though his heart isn’t in it. She does, however, introduce him to a piece of music he didn’t know existed: a string quintet by Beethoven, arranged from an early piano trio (i.e. a work for piano, violin and cello). This astounds him in two ways: firstly, because he had no knowledge of its existence (neither did I and having checked on the Net I now know it really exists); and secondly, because it was a work which he and Julia, a fine pianist, had played together in Vienna with another student on cello.

On the day he finally tracks down a recording of the piece, he is sitting on the top deck of a bus on the way home when the bus stops at some traffic lights; and glancing out of the window he sees another bus stopped alongside. On it, immersed in a book he sees Julia…

So begins a passionate affair. But something is wrong – not just that she is married with a young son, but something altogether darker, a terrible secret that reveals itself in an unexpected way…

Running parallel with his love affair with Julia are other threads in Michael’s life: his uneasy relationship with the other members of the string quartet; his roots in Rochdale where his father and a benefactor still live, a benefactor who many years ago lent him an old and very precious violin, which he still uses; his passion for music; and his love for the violin, a love which is also under threat when his benefactor dies and her relatives want the instrument back. Anyone who plays an instrument with a degree of skill knows that you can’t just pick up another instrument and make the same music: even with my relatively modest accomplishments on the violin and viola I know the sense of one-ness one can get with an instrument after playing it for a while. For a professional musician, to be parted from your instrument is akin to bereavement.

***** The Locations *****

The story takes place largely in four locations, London, Vienna, Venice and Rochdale. Seth does not attempt to paint pictures of these places. For those who know them, just mentioning places suffices: so many times I was transported back to Venice by the names of the vaporetto (water-bus) landing stages. While for those who don’t, nothing is lost. In fact, without lengthy descriptions of places the storyline moves at a better pace.

***** The Music *****
The music mentioned in depth in the book is of interest in itself for those who, like me, are steeped in classical music. For those who aren’t it could, I guess, be a little irksome, though looked at from another viewpoint it could be a wonderful jumping-off point for exploring some wonderful music, especially if you buy the double-CD that I mentioned above. And for me, despite my encyclopaedic knowledge of the field, I found no fewer than three works I hadn’t heard before, by Beethoven, Haydn and Vivaldi: riches indeed. None of the music would frighten anyone with an open mind, encompassing in addition to those composers already mentioned, Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Vaughan Williams (this last represented by The Lark Ascending, one of the most gloriously English pieces ever written).

***** So Why Should I Care? *****

For a book that isn’t sci-fi to grip me, it has to have something special; for me to want to write about it, it has to affect me deeply. This book has done just that. It brought back so many feelings from the past – my days in late teenage, playing violin in a youth orchestra; the old man from the Hull Philharmonic Orchestra, too old to play his nineteenth century French violin and giving it to me; the togetherness of playing string quartets with friends; my early loves and the raw emotion that accompanied each one; the terrible anguish of broken romances… And it reinforced my passion for music and my love of Venice and made me want to take my violin from its resting place in the loft, to restring it and play it once more.

Through the whole book is a sense of sadness and nostalgia for things past. It is written with tremendous sensitivity, evoking Michael Holme’s feelings, frailty and total humanity with such skill that throughout the book I WAS Michael Holme. I grieved with him, rejoiced with him, heard the music through his ears and on one memorable occasion felt my heart pounding with sickening apprehension in time to his. This was at a point where he and his fellow Quartet member Piers go to an auction because Piers is desperate to buy a particular violin. Piers starts bidding way beyond his means and Michael is unable to reign him in. The tension in this episode is unbearable and I found my pulse-rate increasing almost painfully

A large part of the effectiveness of this book, alongside the wonderful use of language, is the fact that it is told in the present tense, so that one is travelling through the narrative alongside the main character, who doesn’t know what is on the next page any more that we do. Telling it in the past tense would have somehow weakened the effect. (Mrs Floon used present tense to great effect in her recent book, too, for the same reason.)

I don’t think I’ve read any other book that has touched me so deeply. If you’ve ever been in love, you will respond to it even if you are not into classical music. While if you are a classical music lover you will find it totally absorbing.

***** So If You Want It... *****

I felt almost offended to note that on Amazon you can buy a secondhand copy of this book for just one penny (plus postage and packing of course). It’s a priceless treasure beyond compare. Still, if that’s all they’re charging, why not treat yourself? If you want a new copy, that’s only £3.99, while the double CD, a wonderful companion to the novel, is £13.99 and gives almost 160 minutes of heavenly music.

Excuse me while I go up to the loft to find my violin…
 

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