Song of Time

Song of Time is a melancholy reflection of life and legacy. Roushana Maitland is preparing to die, or more accurately shed her physical body and enter digital immortality. In the middle of her preparations, a young man with amnesia washes ashore on the cliffs below her house.

The meat of the book is is Roushana reflecting on her life through the tumultuous 21st century, and the role of art in a world. A talented concert violinist, Roushana provides a frame to ask if art gives life meaning, and if not art, then what. The biography is a clever way to provide a future history that is just short of apocalyptic. A new disease claims Roushana's brother. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan almost kills her mother. Global warming threatens show more everything, until the Yellowstone Volcano erupts and cools the plnet, at the cost of North America. Somehow, life goes on.

The book is best when it explores Roushana's relationship with the artistic people around her. Her piano prodigy brother, the gender-ambiguous critic Harad, her husband and conductor Claude, in his talent and weakness. The glimpses of the future are both chilling and believable. The 'present' timeline, with the amnesiac young man, doesn't do as much, and the odd unlife of the digitally immortal is sadly wasted as it relates to what the world looks like. Still, this is a satisfying, sophisticated, and melancholy yet optimistic book. show less

This won the Clarke Award back in 2009, and is I think the first novel-length fiction I've read by MacLeod. Although I know of his work, and have read several shorter pieces, and met him a couple of times at cons, his books are not ones I usually read. And… Well, Song of Time is quite good… but just not very interesting.

Roushana Maitland was a world-famous concert violinist. She is spending her last days in her isolated house in Cornwall, when she finds the body of a young man on the beach. He’s still alive, so she nurses him back to health. He’s amnesiac, with no idea of his identity, or how he came to be in the sea. Roushana is trying to decide whether or not to accept being uploaded and turned into a “ghost”. She tells show more the young man - naming him Adam - her life-story.

The two timelines - from Roushana’s early teens late last century going forward; and somewhere near the end of the twenty-first century - more or less alternate. Roushana’s musically-gifted older brother commits suicide after contracting some sort of engineered disease that causes complicated, and compiled, food allergies. She studies to be a violinist, and moves to Paris. Where she ends up in a relationship with Claude, a famous composer from the US, and joins a sort of artistic belle monde. Meanwhile, her mother gets involved in charity work in Gujarat, and is blinded when a nuclear bomb is dropped on Ahmedabad.

And so it goes. The couple’s fame grows, there’s a huge volcanic eruption which causes a nuclear winter, Roushana and Claude have kids, Claude dies in a car accident. There’s a messianic figure in Paris, who threatens to overturn an upcoming election before the eruption, but then he disappears.

It all feels like less than the sum of its parts. The narrative solves the mystery of Claude’s death, but it was never presented as a mystery. The christ-like figure disappears from the story, and seems to have served no purpose. Even Adam’s identity Roushana manages to work out in the last few pages of the book, and it barely qualifies as a plot twist.

On the other hand, the writing is very good, and the characters are well-drawn. The world-building seems weirdly old-fashioned in places - a nonbinary character is presented as “he or she” throughout, Indian cities are referred to by their old names (such as Bombay, which changed to Mumbai in 1995), and most of the cultural references are mid-twentieth century. Having said that, classical music is really not my thing, so any novel which features it so heavily is going to struggle to keep my interest.

Looking at the Clarke shortlist for 2009… the award could have gone to any of the nominated books. It was nice to see a small press, PS Publishing, take the gong, and perhaps Martin Martin’s on the Other side by Mark Wernham would have been considered too left-field to be a popular winner… Song of Time was not an unhappy choice. but I can’t say it inspired me to seek out MacLeod’s other novels. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/song-of-time-by-iain-r-macleod/

The only other book I’ve read by this author is his best known work, The Light Ages, which I felt ambivalent about. But I really enjoyed this, and it has incentivised me to look out for his other books. It’s a story in two timelines: the very near future collapse of western civilisation due to plague and unrest, and the slightly further future timeline putting it all back together again. The narrator is a world-famous violinist from Birmingham with Irish and Indian heritage; her marriage to a world-famous conductor reflects the integration and disintegration of their world, as she retells the story years later to a mysterious visitor to her Cornwall cottage. Really good, show more and you can get it here. show less

This is elegant & lovely. A woman looking back on her life as she prepares to die, in a world very like ours could become. Speculative fiction with a mystery, a twist and compelling characters. A lot about music and art. This book won many awards.

3.5 stars. I listened to this novel and loved the narrator and much of the novel but he goes to big (environmental destruction, disaster, politics, culture, body farms) and then can't quite pull it together in the end. His narrative frame didn't work. Although the tone was really consistent and it was a great listen. I'd happily recommend it to others.

Had to ILL this, could not be found locally.. wow. Could NOT get into it.