The opening line of Susan Mann’s lyrical second novel, Quarter Tones, evokes the tension and fear that a person experiences when they have moved away from their family and home. “It was winter when she finally went back, just too late.” She is Ana Luisa, who returns to South Africa when her father dies.
The reader experiences the story as a mixture of Ana’s thoughts, memories, interactions and perceptions of the world around her. It’s an effect that Mann achieves through her effortlessly poetic style. The lack of quotation marks, for example, erases the seams between Ana’s words that are voiced aloud and her thoughts about the person to whom she is speaking. Additionally, other people’s words arrive into her consciousness without the fanfare of punctuation, like any other sensation, such as sights and sounds.
Mann’s constant variation of sentence lengths also draws the reader into a rhythm. This enables her to build tension when long sentences, containing clause upon clause, crash into sentences only a few words long.
Additionally, it’s an extremely visual novel. The author sneaks detail, such as the colour of objects, into your mind through subtly layered descriptions that work to give definition to Ana’s world.
The fluidity of time and place further deepens the scope of the book, taking it beyond the confines of Ana’s trip to South Africa. Ana’s memories introduce us to her playful Irish father, for example, whom we often find working on some or other musical instrument.
The other significant childhood presence that Ana recalls is the absence of her mother, who died giving birth to her. This remembered loss of her mother, her father’s death and the many disappointments and dislocations in her and other characters’ lives fill this book with a pervasive sense of sadness and overwhelming loneliness.
But the book’s emotional weight does not slow the pace of the novel, which speeds through 26 quick chapters in less than 200 pages. Its apparent brevity masks volumes of experience and it is a thoroughly engrossing and beautifully told tale.
Initially, I found the book’s title confusing. At first glance, it seemed to refer to the musicality of Ana’s upbringing. Her father made string instruments and her mother played the flute, an instrument to which Ana also became deeply attached. She often quotes her father, saying that the most important things are often the hardest to say out loud, which is why we have music.
Looking up “quarter tone” on the internet, however, gave new shades of meaning to the title. I stumbled across an essay written in the 1940s, which began: “Would you like to stir up a heated controversy in a gathering of musicians? It’s very simple. Just mention the word quarter tone.”
Moreover, quarter tones are used to create a kind of harmony particular to certain music cultures, such as traditional Greek or Arab music. Not all instruments can play quarter tones: the piano cannot, woodwinds can.
This sense of quarter tones as difficult and unique, controversial and somehow other, seems appropriate when used to refer to a story about a woman whose life comes across as out of the ordinary, and who finds new harmonies during her stay in Cape Town.
When Ana goes back to her childhood home in Noordhoek, she leaves her career-driven husband behind in London. Back home she explores a new pace of life that sometimes involves the quietly feuding brothers next door and their sage, mother-figure domestic worker.
Fortunately, Mann’s carefully constructed characters emerge credibly enough to withstand their proximity to potentially worn subjects and themes. This is a narrow escape in a few instances, but for the most part the book is captivating precisely because the experiences Mann relates are so novel and the characters singularly complex.