Adam Mars-Jones
AN EQUAL MUSIC by Vikram Seth (Phoenix House)
It was famously observed of Henry James that he sometimes bit off less than he could chew, but the accusation is an unexpected one to be directed at Vikram Seth. His first novel, after all, the monumental A Suitable Boy, was a feat of absorption that required something similar from its readers, the sort of feat most often seen among snakes whose jaws can dislocate to admit prey larger than themselves.
Compared with that book, An Equal Music is a bagatelle, yet, at nearly 400 pages, it has scale, if not necessarily substance. The first work to which Seth attached the designation “novel”, his narrative poem The Golden Gate, was set in America, A Suitable Boy in India. Now he tackles Europe, and symbolically by its supreme cultural achievement – classical music.
Michael Holme, the book’s narrator, is the second violinist of an up-and-coming string quartet with a history of mild turmoil.
What classical music enacts for those who inhabit it imaginatively is a melting of opposites into each other, sensuousness and rigour, lightness and depth. The lives of those who interpret the music, however, lives that involve rehearsals, tours, worries about instruments and injuries, only intermittently offer access to this treasure.
Seth treats the performers’ lives as if they were faithful reflections of the splendours and miseries experienced by the composers they seek to serve. Playing in Vienna, Michael slips into Schubert’s point of view – “The earth took my syphilis- ridden flesh, my typhoid-ravaged guts, my vainly loving heart many times around the sun before my quintet for strings was heard by human ears.”
An Equal Music has an ultra-canonical approach to the repertoire. As for modern composers, let alone living composers, there aren’t any. The only post-classical music performed in the book is a bit of caricatural avantgardism. As a love letter to the classical canon, Seth’s novel has a touching fervency, but as a novel it’s something of a non-starter.
A readership promised big tunes is offered instead almost 400 pages of tuning up. In place of a story there are only grace- notes, which might adorn a fuller composition but are quite unable to generate any narrative momentum.