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Loading... Music, in a Foreign Languageby Andrew Crumey
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Not being a straightforward narrative this is a difficult novel to describe. Tenses shift within sections, there are stories within stories, false starts, rewritten chapters, repetitions of scenarios and the narrator is at pains to point out the fictionality of it all, indeed at times it reads more as a disquisition on literary efforts than an attempt at one. Yet, for all these strictures, it was immensely readable. The tricksiness begins early as the novel starts with Chapter 0, where the narrator is thinking post coital thoughts about two characters who meet on a train and about whom he intends to write a novel. The bulk of Music, in a Foreign Language deals with the back story of one of these, a young man called Duncan, and the events leading up to the death of his father, Robert Waters. Waters and his friend Charles King had at the time been involved in slightly subversive activity in a Soviet style post-war Britain. This was the first appearance of that altered history in which Crumey also set parts of Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia. The compromises such a society demands, the paranoia it engenders - and the betrayals it necessitates - are allowed to emerge organically from the story. Despite the title, music as a motif appears sparingly. My one minor caveat is that the female characters are not as fully rounded as they might be, but the book’s main focus is on the friendship between Waters and King, so perhaps that is understandable. I was equally as impressed by this, Crumey’s debut novel, as I was by both others of his I have read. If you like well written, thoughtful - even playful - novels you could do worse than give Crumey a try. no reviews | add a review
Winner of Scotland's Saltire Prize for Best First Novel Set in an imaginary police state in modern Britain, Andrew Crumey's debut novel explores the complex friendship between two men, Charles King and Robert Waters, a physicist and a historian who share a secret history of political and sexual dimensions. An underground magazine they had once co-published brings then under an investigation that pits one against the other. As the novel's narrator unfolds the tale, he reveals pieces of his own life. His autobiography is augmented by the story of the two friends like the melody and counterpoint of a fugue, until both movements inevitably join across time. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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There's a good deal of meta reframing going along: found notebooks, the germ of a novel during a nocturnal trip to the toilet. There's also philosophical musing -- destiny and love fare and fall. There a crackpot who claims that physics led him to Jesus and a cure for halitosis. The novel is drab and understated. There is a stirring within, a promise of a wider violent lens. I think I'd prefer that one. ( )