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The cruelty of fiction is that its organs may be in the right place, itscomplexion excellent, but if it has not breath, it will not move. ASuitable Boy did move. If one believes that works of art can embody thegood, it was a virtuous book, of enormous length but also of a blessedkind of quiet. It did not clamour; therefore one paid attention, enjoyingthe surcease of babble and garishness that had stirred much of the surface of subcontinental literature in English for some time previously.
The Golden Gate, Seth's accomplished homage to Charles Johnson's translation of Eugene Onegin, was smug, but had every right to be. It caught California's freedoms in its disciplined rhythms. Like its huge little brother, it withstands repeated readings.
This new novel addresses itself to what the author, in an afternote, says that he holds "dearer even than speech", that is music. With his
understanding of silence, periods, rhythm and tempo and his obvious attention to composition, he would seem a fine candidate for this challenge, to which Proust is one of the few to rise successfully.
An Equal Music offers as its hero Michael Holme, who plays second violin in the Maggiore Quartet. A quartet is a good subject for a novel, providing sufficient personalities and a pungent mixture of grind and art. The other players are gay Piers, his disappointed sister Helen, and uxorious Billy who likes chocolate biscuits and is in consequence overweight.
Repeatedly throughout An Equal Music this schematic structure of character disappoints the reader who had heretofore relished Seth's stealth and subtlety with human nature. It would be wrong to dignify the imaginative shortfall of this book by ascribing it to the narrator, although it is true that he does seem to be locked in a persona of startling limitations. Some wonderful musicians manifest an almost autistic relation to the world, but surely no novelist as intelligent (and committed to high art) as Seth would choose an apologist so direly undeveloped as Michael.
With an admirable instinct for the exotic, Seth has drawn Michael from the northern working class. His father, a butcher, possesses a cat and a television; there is talk of stodgy foodstuffs. But the whole earnest scene topples perilously when gobbets of - wholly worthy - politicking intrude. The best-developed theme of the book, anyhow, concerning the generosity of kind Mrs Formby who spots Michael's talent and finds for him not a ukelele, but a violin, would have made the point without unbalancing over-emphasis.
Aged six, Michael was shut in one of his father's meat refrigerators. Judging from the uninflected frozenness of his subsequent self, we must believe this was his primal scene.
Yet An Equal Music presents itself as a novel about love. Michael has loved and lost the half-Austrian pianist, Julia, by whom he is haunted, although when we meet him he is sleeping with the implausible Virginie who has simply been taken off a shelf at Agnes B.
When Julia returns in his life, Michael cannot at once place what is strange about her. We intuit what it is, but only just, since the clue is given by the woodenness of her speech, which in the context of a novel whose dialogue is distinguished for its board-game literalness, is risky. The pain and irony of a fine musician's encroaching deafness is a great subject. Sadly neither Michael nor Julia is up to conveying it. We accompany the two artists through the misery of adultery, to Vienna, to Venice, even, and we feel little beyond irritation and an unwilled embarrassment at the persistent implausible reminders of Julia's gender to which we are treated, her scent, her hair, her scarves, her unconveyed desirability.
Michael, too, has a gender-specific wardrobe of things to be and do. More mention is made of his shaving than might be required of a neophyte teenage boaster. He buys croissants, seven at a time. He inhabits a London that might have fascinatingly been exposed, the London of not very highlyremunerative creativity, while Julia lives in Elgin Crescent. The mighty heart could just as well have given out, for we hear no intimation of its beat.
It is, miserably, hearing, in which this book, for all its preoccupation with the cruelty of deafness, is most deficient. Music itself suffers throughout from the exegetic kind of writing that is the bane of any but the best sleeve-notes, and from being discussed by the members of the Maggiore Quartet in a way that reminds one how perilous, if sweetsuckingly pleasurable, is shop-talk. But the great uncatchable elusive thing remains out of reach.
There are felicities, but they may be counted; they do not flow. Surprisingly, beneath the unsatisfactory surface and the declared beautiful themes, this is a book deep in dislike and distaste, of smuggled anger. This suggests that the author simply could not help writing it, for both the best and the worst reasons. I do not doubt that it constitutes a labour of love. No da capo al fine then, uniquely in the work of this much-praised writer; instead one feels sad, but not in the way that art will leave you so, and not bereft but released.
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