Steven Poole
MUSIC AND SILENCE by Rose Tremain (Chatto &Windus)
Music and silence, as Rose Tremain knows, are not necessarily opposites. They inhabit each other. Silence is given meaning by the music built around it. And much of the meaning of music resides in the unique character of silence that it engenders at its end. This is a truth unknown to those who begin clapping on the very instant the music has stopped sounding. A work’s one true live performance, with seconds of contemplative reverberance dissolving into stillness, can only happen on its world premiere.
Tremain’s central character, Peter Claire, is a lutenist, and the lute embodies precisely this symbiotic intermingling, for the sound of a plucked string begins rapidly to fade as soon as it is sounded: the music is filled with a thousand tiny deaths. On the other hand, this superb novel, humming with music real and imagined, literal and figurative, knows very well the limits of the application of musical aesthetics to life: one character is determined that her love affair “cannot end like this in a slow fading to silence”. Divorced from the taming, creative influence of music, silence becomes an avatar of despair.
It is 1629, and Peter Claire has arrived at the palace of King Christian IV of Denmark to join the court orchestra. Christian loves the spectral reverberance of music so much that he requires it to inform a whole performance, confining his players to a dank cellar, whence their sound floats up through an ingenious arrangement of pipes and trapdoors to waft around the king’s comfortable listening room.
They are a motley bunch, these musicians plucked from all over Europe, but their harmonies are famous, even though they must share a freezing dungeon with irritable, squawking hens.
Meanwhile Christian’s wife Kirsten is dreaming of her flagellatory encounters with a certain count, confiding her lascivious schemes to her “private papers” for our eyes. Kirsten’s serving- woman, Emilia, meets Peter in the court grounds and they fall in love. But then the adulterous Kirsten is banished from the court, taking Emilia with her. Christian, however, who calls Peter his “angel” on account of the lutenist’s blond good looks, is not abut to let the musician go.
It would be facile to say that Tremain’s remarkable ability with first-person characterisation produces a harmonious polyphony. Of course musical polyphony requires simultaneity, which prose, no matter how energetically it intercuts between scenes, can only fake.
As if to emphasise such formal incommensurabilities, Tremain gives us a wonderful sub-plot, one of many parables with which this story teems, involving a man who one night awakes from a beautiful dream of music and goes slowly mad trying to reproduce the phantom song on his keyboard.
As the major plotlines drive along at gripping pace, Tremain still finds time to lavish attention on painterly miniatures. But the crowning virtue of this novel is Tremain’s restlessly probing sympathy, so that if no character is of totally unblemished virtue, neither is anyone thoroughly bad: life just has more “teasing complexity” than that.
Music and Silence is a wonderful, joyously noisy book.