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| The Shieling by David Constantine | Book freview M John Harrison is captivated by a collection of edgy, magical storiesThe inhabitants of David Constantine's short stories struggle towards secrets they already know – secrets kept somehow from themselves or imparted to them by others and only now pursued. Obsessed by bearings, directions, instructions, they read their way towards things. In "Witness", Grete and Sam follow someone else's map through a vast, abandoned opencast mine in Germany, a place "filled with silence, the silence of afterwards, of what continues and must be contemplated after the thing is done"; after his death, the ageing students of "Memorial" remember their way back to their favourite tutor the way a pet animal finds its way home after some lengthy, unplanned journey. The couple in "The Shieling", meanwhile, aren't just making their way somewhere – they're making the destination itself, inventing it as they go.It's a fraught task, which perhaps mimics the author's own. The reward, though, is always a quiet and perfect instant of humanity. There's not a cheap note here. People are viewed directly, but not clinically; neither are they, despite the wry humour, made fun of. The events presented are often everyday in themselves – births, deaths, meetings, partings – but they locate, just for a moment, the flicker of the ecstatic in landscapes both psychic and geographical. Each location seems enchanted – in "Living On", there's even a wood named Broceliande – and the exchanges that take place there sometimes have a mythological, though entirely unmannered, feel about them. Waters, springs, moorland pools, blessing and cursing wells, all become sites of both mystery and ordinariness.The ecstatic isn't always beautiful – "Regrets" and "The Blind Home" are outright horror stories, although you don't realise that until it's too late – but it is always dangerous. In "Beginning" a boy meets a girl on the number 42 bus in central Manchester. He never knows her name, but she gives him a book – Wilfred Owen's poems – and the moment he opens it his life seems to change. He sees his first dead body, a man pulled out of the Irwell in a stream of dirty water, to hang and twirl, "his clothes undoing around his midriff"; but he never sees the girl again.Constantine's prose is generally quiet, a little inturned, as matter-of-fact as the events depicted, but when necessary, for a fraction of a second, or a fraction of a sentence, it will take on completely different qualities. "I remember her eyes," says the narrator of "Beginning", "the soul staring out of them, eager and scared . . ." Suddenly you're not on a bus any more. Your way of seeing the boy and his life has been changed. This is not to say that Constantine is a writer of motive or psychology in the accepted sense. "Who knows why people do things?" one character says to another. "I'm more interested in what they look like while they're doing them . . ."Dialogue is presented without quote marks; indirect speech is sometimes attributed rather too indirectly. As a result, it can be hard to know who's speaking, or even which character is which. There are descriptions of places which don't quite produce a picture, and actions which, described only by their emotional component, never quite come into focus as actions. The effect is sometimes powerful, in that it gives the feeling of people struggling to manage a vagueness in their lives, especially in their expectations; struggling, too, with the attempt to communicate it. At other times – as in "Words to Say It", a curiously male psychodrama of sexual dissociation and the inability to speak – it makes the narrative unnecessarily hard to navigate. You aren't sure whether you're following a subtle emotional contour or simply misreading the map.It's possible to resist Constantine for a page, half a page, of each story. Perhaps it's the obliquity of the narrative; more likely it's something in the characters you don't want to know, something about their lives or their thoughts that reminds you too intimately of your own. Then suddenly you can't stop reading. You've embraced the story in the exact moment it captivated you. Perhaps the most beautiful and striking piece here is "The Cave". Lou pursues Owen, a writer who lives, self-possessed and needing nobody, in a house by the moors. Lou's sister thinks she should move on; she thinks that "if he doesn't love you he shouldn't keep doing things with you that make you love him more".But Lou persists without knowing why, and one day Owen takes her to the eponymous cave in the limestone hills, to listen to the sound of a stream bursting out of the rock, a "churning, milling, steady mechanical cold breathing", a "pulse of inhuman life in total darkness". It's an appalling sound, and it seeps right into you. He tried to sleep there as a boy, he tells her, but the sound drove him away. "Then we'll stay," says Lou; and they do. The mythology and psychology of this are obvious. But as much as the sound of the water is a metaphor, it's also perfectly literal: the sound of geology, of the universe, of the simple, implacable, forgotten matrix of things.If it's possible to be a romantic existentialist, David Constantine is. Lou and Owen must pitch every word they say to one another against the noise in the cave. We are all we have. But beware: this understanding, and Constantine's way with it, can leave some other kinds of contemporary fiction feeling brittle and empty.M John Harrison's Nova Swing is published by Gollancz.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
HC Robbins Landon obituary Distinguished musicologist known for his trailblazing work on Haydn and his books on MozartFew musicologists achieve true celebrity outside their specialist field. But the name of HC Robbins Landon, who has died at the age of 83, was known by many thousands of people beyond the scholarly community. While his reputation was founded on his trailblazing research into Joseph Haydn, which helped to establish the composer's works – largely unknown as late as the 1950s – in the canon, it was his series of books on Mozart, aimed at a wider public and selling in huge numbers in many languages, that brought him global renown.It is no exaggeration to call him a titan, for Robbie, as he was universally known, was a giant in both physical and intellectual terms. And yet his infectious enthusiasm for the subject under discussion, coupled with an encyclopedic memory and almost recklessly fluent delivery, allowed him to engage lay audiences in a way that few scholars are able.Born in Boston and educated at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, Landon studied music theory, composition and English literature, the latter under WH Auden. His interest in Haydn had already been piqued as a schoolboy, but an encounter with the scholar Karl Geiringer, his teacher at Boston University (1945-47), helped him on his chosen path. Realising that his future lay in Europe, where all the relevant sources were located, he managed to secure work as a music critic and European correspondent for various US newspapers and journals, including Musical America.Employment by the Times, for which he worked for nearly a decade, was a crucial factor in gaining him admittance to archives behind the iron curtain. The papers of Haydn's employers, the princes of Esterházy, in the National Library in Budapest, had recently been taken over by the state. General access was all but impossible, but the Times connection ensured that he was treated with courtesy and even offered a visa.In 1949 the Haydn Society was founded at his instigation. Originally located in Boston, but later operating out of Vienna also, the society planned a complete edition of Haydn's works, of which only a tenth had been published at that time; the project was subsequently abandoned, though much valuable musicological work was undertaken by the society. Equally notable were the recordings it issued, which included a number of Haydn's works, not least symphonies and masses, that had been previously unavailable on disc. The first recordings of Mozart's C minor Mass and Idomeneo were also made by the society.Partly in conjunction with the activities of the Haydn Society, Landon began to produce critical editions and other material relating to the composer at this time. The first major publishing milestone was The Symphonies of Joseph Haydn (1955), which presented those works in the context of Haydn's output as a whole and of 18th-century music in general. Meanwhile he published editions of a number of Haydn's other works, notably masses and operas, helping to stimulate performances and effectively bringing about a reappraisal of Haydn's abilities as a dramatic composer.The crowning achievement of his Haydn scholarship was the five-volume Haydn: Chronicle and Works (1976-80). The prodigious detail in which Landon lays out in these volumes the documentary material unearthed from the archives is a compliment as much to his faithful publishers, Thames & Hudson, as it is to Landon himself. It is difficult to imagine a similar project being undertaken today. To take examples at random, in volume one the salaries and payments in kind made in 1760 to Haydn's musicians at Eisenstadt are listed: they include precise allocations of wheat, corn, lard, candles, cabbage and beets, and, for some privileged players, a pig or two.The third volume, covering the London years, includes, among its scores of documents, diary accounts by Haydn of his visit to Ascot, intimate information about Haydn's visits to a surgeon (wishing to remove a polyp from the composer's nose, the surgeon summoned "a few brawny fellows" to hold him down, but Haydn resisted) and much more besides.Further esoterica are found in the copious footnotes, placed, where they belong but are too rarely found, on the page. If, in the case of Haydn, Landon's efforts effected a radical reappraisal of the composer by bringing many of the works into the public domain for the first time, with Mozart his influence was of a different order. By the time he produced his five Mozart publications – 1791: Mozart's Last Year, Mozart: The Golden Years, The Mozart Compendium, Mozart and Vienna, and The Mozart Essays – between 1988 and 1995, Mozart was firmly established in the pantheon of great composers. Thanks to the huge success of Peter Shaffer's 1979 play and 1984 film Amadeus, not only was Mozart's music suddenly on the bestseller lists, but a new mythology had grown up around the last months of Mozart's life: the relationship with Salieri, the Requiem, the "mysterious messenger", the final illness, the pauper's burial.Landon's achievement was to cut through the fantasy and mystification to present the facts regarding the composer's last year, unveiling new documentary material in the process. He found no grounds for Mozart's having been poisoned by Salieri, or anyone else, taking the most likely cause of Mozart's death to be a combination of medical factors including progressive kidney failure, and restored the reputation of his wife, Constanze, slandered over decades as a scatterbrained, lascivious woman, incapable of understanding Mozart and encouraging him to live a disorderly, if not dissolute, existence. As text editor of 1791: Mozart's Last Year, I was privileged to play a small role in the dissemination of this revisionist view of Mozart.Landon had always been generous in his acknowledgment of editorial and other assistance. In his earlier work on Haydn, his first wife, Christa Landon, a distinguished harpsichordist and scholar in her own right, killed in an air crash in 1977, had been an indispensable colleague. His second wife, Else Radant, also a historian of some note, was to provide further invaluable support for the next couple of decades. He relied too on a secretariat and assorted assistants, publicists and editors to manage his schedule and other administrative trivia, allowing him to concentrate on the matters in which he had the expertise. For all the exhaustiveness of his research and annotation, detail was not necessarily his strong suit.Nor were the niceties of prose style, which made the process of coaxing the material he provided into a coherent narrative an interesting challenge.His freely expressed gratitude to assistants, as to fellow-scholars, made him a pleasure to work with, however. It was an instructive experience too: one could but marvel at his ability to bring to life the dry documentary material retrieved from dusty library shelves. Both on the printed page and in the radio studio he communicated an enthusiasm that for once endowed musicology with the excitement of a detective story. It was this lightness of touch allied to his scholarly credentials and an almost missionary desire to share knowledge with the world at large that brought him unprecedented financial rewards as well as critical acclaim. In an interview conducted a couple of years before he died, he reported that he had just received a royalty cheque for his five Mozart books amounting to $80,000. Even allowing for the multiple reissues and translations of 1791, the figure represents an astonishing, and surely unequalled, return on a scholarly endeavour of this nature.An episode that Landon and others of us would probably prefer to gloss over occurred a few years after the publication of 1791. Towards the end of 1993, a group of six piano sonatas thought to be by Haydn came to light, their authenticity verified by the performer-scholars Paul and Eva Badura-Skoda and by Landon. The January issue of the BBC Music Magazine, of which I was then reviews editor, carried an article by Landon proclaiming their merits. The February issue carried a retraction, it having been discovered that the sonatas were a skilful modern fraud perpetrated by a German recorder player and composer called Winfried Michel. The episode illustrates perhaps Landon's penchant for precipitate and over-zealous judgment, but it provoked at the same time a worthwhile debate about the extent to which our perception of the greatness of works is determined by our knowledge of their composer.Other composers on whom he worked and published included Vivaldi, Handel, JC Bach and Beethoven. Some of the work outside his specialist field was criticised for its lack of scholarly rigour, though none could dispute the brio he brought to his subject. The book Five Centuries of Music in Venice (1991), written in conjunction with John Julius Norwich, was conceived as a companion to a television series called Maestro, created by Landon and Norwich, and broadcast by Channel 4 in association with the French broadcaster La Sept. His autobiographical Horns in High C, published in 1999, related the events of his career with characteristically breathless enthusiasm.His academic appointments included professorships at Queens College, New York (1969) and the University of California at Davis (1970). He was John Bird Professor of Music at the University of Wales, Cardiff (1978-93) and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1979). He was also awarded honorary doctorates by Boston University, Queen's University, Belfast, Bristol University and the New England Conservatory, as well as the Siemens prize (1991) and the medal of honour of the Handel and Haydn Society (1993).Fluent in several languages, Robbie made his home at different times in America, Britain, Vienna and France. It was to his beautiful 18th-century chateau at Rabastens, near Toulouse, that he finally retired, spending his last decade or so with his companion Marie-Noelle Raynal-Bechetoille, who, like Else Radant, survives him (there were no children from either marriage). An epicurean and bon vivant, he was no less generous with his hospitality than with his scholarship.To spend time in his company was as exhausting as it was stimulating: nuggets of musical fact would be extricated from the vast repository of knowledge that was his brain. A tendency to solipsism was balanced by a remarkable capacity for thoughtfulness. I was deeply touched to receive a telephone call from him one Christmas Day when he guessed I would be on my own. Others will have different stories to tell of his boundless generosity. Larger than life, he was an inspirational presence, bringing a penetrating intellect and theatrical flair to the world of musicology.• Howard Chandler Robbins Landon, musicologist, born 6 March 1926; died 20 November 2009Classical musicMusicWolfgang Amadeus MozartOperaPeter ShafferThe TimesAustriaHungaryUnited StatesBarry Millingtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
We don't need God, we've got biscuits | Charlie Brooker Listen to Charlie read his contribution to The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, edited by Ariane Sherine. The book is out now in print, audio and on iTunes. The contributors and editor have donated their full share of the profits to the Terrence Higgins TrustCharlie Brooker feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Television Review | 'Louisa May Alcott': A Writer Whose Life Had as Many Ups and Downs as a Victorian Novel Anyone who has ever complained about the difficulties of the writing life should watch this biography of the novelist Louisa May Alcott. feeds.nytimes.com |
Blacklands by Belinda Bauer | Book review Laura Wilson is gripped by a debut crime novel from Belinda BauerThis astonishingly assured debut, from journalist and screenwriter Belinda Bauer, for once lives up to the hype. Set on Exmoor, it's the story of a cat-and-mouse game between 12-year-old Steven and Arnold Avery, the serial violator and killer of children who, 18 years before, murdered Steven's 11-year-old Uncle Billy and never revealed where he buried the body.Steven's grandmother, soured by grief, spends her time standing at the front window waiting for her boy to return and sniping at her daughter, Steven's downtrodden mother Lettie. Steven's dad is long gone, replaced by a succession of short-term "uncles", and the house is damp, decaying and comfortless. Uncle Billy's bedroom, with a half-built Lego space-station on the floor and a Manchester City scarf pinned above the bed, is a shrine. Steven himself, unpopular and bullied at school, where even the teachers find it hard to identify him other than as the kid who smells faintly of mildew, spends his spare time digging holes on Exmoor, desperate to heal his family by finding Uncle Billy's corpse. When the scale of this task proves too much, he hits on the idea of writing to Avery for information.Told in lucid, uncluttered prose, the description of the effect of this correspondence on both parties is genuinely chilling: aching, frantic hope on Steven's part, as he scrabbles to find clues in the killer's laconic responses, and, for Avery, gloating relish when he realises that the letter-writer is a child. With little in the way of graphic detail – Bauer is too good a writer to jerk us into the past with clumsy italicised flashbacks – Blacklands is a world away from the "torture porn" school of crime fiction, and a hundred times more effective in terms of visceral impact. Avery's notion of children purely as objects to be used for his gratification makes him a thoroughly convincing villain, as does his ability to manipulate. Not only does he preside over Steven's family, a hideous, unseen and unmentioned ringmaster, but he also plays mind games with his fellow prisoners, who dance to his tune when he goads them into a riot in order to divert attention from his escape.Creating a child protagonist is always a risky undertaking. Very often, authors succumb to the temptation to endow their youthful characters with insight and a breadth of knowledge way beyond their years, using naivety merely as a device. Steven, however, is impeccably, even heartbreakingly, well imagined in his quest not only for understanding, but also to justify his existence – or, as he puts it, to show that he is "better" than everyone thinks: "His nan would see that and everything would change . . . And if Nan loved him and Davey, maybe she and Mum would be nicer to each other, they would all be happier, and be a normal family . . . and well . . . just everything would be . . . better." As well as detailing the frustrating powerlessness of childhood, Bauer also paints a vivid portrait of the rupturing effect of a child's murder upon a family, with its aftermath of fractured, stunted people with only one reference point in their lives. Steven's grandmother "had started life as Gloria Manners. Then she became Ron Peters's wife. After that, she was Lettie's mum, then Lettie and Billy's mum. Then for a long time she was Poor Mrs Peters. Now she was Steven's nan. But underneath she would always be Poor Mrs Peters; nothing could change that, not even her grandsons."Bauer takes a few liberties with the prison service, and the response to Avery's escape is the one area where the book strikes a false note. However, this is a minor cavil about an otherwise pitch-perfect tale: a psychological tour-de-force about the cruelty of hope and, ultimately, the triumph of innocence.Laura Wilson's An Empty Death is published by Orion.FictionCrime booksLaura Wilsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |