Piano tuner’s tale hits the right note
Love is Blind, William Boyd, Random House, (369 pages, hardcover $35.95, ebook and audio available)
I approached this book with some trepidation. I seem to be losing my reading attention span and this novel is a long tome, a traditional historical romance, not my favourite genre.
It was the occupation of the main character, a piano-tuner, that caught my eye. But after the first 100 pages, I was hooked, and found myself reading right to the end in the early morning hours (did I mention my insomnia?)
Brodie Moncur grew up in a Scottish manse in the 1870s, the oldest of nine children, hating his tyrannical clergyman father. His saintly mother died when he was 14 but a wealthy widow fostered his education both academic and musical. He starts work as a tuner for Channon, an Edinburgh piano manufacturer, and is assigned to their Paris office because he can speak French. The owner’s son is barely managing the branch and resents Brodie’s burgeoning success. Brodie gets the idea that they contract with a famous concert pianist, providing him with his personal grand piano and payment of 50 pounds for each concert.
John Kilbarron is well-known as the Irish Lizst and soon warms to Brodie’s tuning skills: he has pains in his right arm and shoulder but Brodie adjusts the action on the treble half of the keyboard so the keys are “as light as goosedown.” Kilbarron’s career is managed by his brother Malachi, and his lover is a Russian soprano, Lika Blum.
Lika’s beauty and seductiveness have Brodie enthralled. He must keep their illicit affair secret from John and Malachi, or risk losing his role in their European concert entourage. But as a young man liberated from a strict childhood, he is almost willing to give up his career to have Lika to himself. He gets called back to Paris by the senior Channon, only to be asked to resign over some expenses trumped up the owner’s son. With a year’s salary as severance, he continues to work for the Kilbarrons, who have now moved to St. Petersburg where an extremely rich widow has chosen John to play concerts of Russian repertoire in her theatre and compose new works for her. The four of them spend the summer in the patron’s dacha and Lika and Brodie are able to meet and make love clandestinely on a riverbank. But both know that this cannot end well.
Early in his career with Channon, Brodie suddenly coughs up blood and is diagnosed with tuberculosis. He must move to a Mediterranean climate to save his health. Channon will pay half his sanitarium expenses in Nice, but he gets no salary (state-run medicare is a long way off !) There is no cure for TB or consumption and Brodie is forced to face his own mortality. Will he get to spend the rest of his possibly shortened life with Lika? How can he escape from Russia with her, where can they live undetected?
By mid-book, “Love is Blind” becomes a page-turner. This is William Boyd’s 15th novel, many of which have won awards. It is a satisfying travelogue through fin-de siècle Edinburgh, Paris and St. Petersburg. But it is much more, with literary and musical references that had me Googling their origins. It was Chekov who said that a gun appearing in act one should be fired in act two: this gun is Lika’s doublebarrelled Derringer. The passages about piano-tuning entice rather than bore. Brodie is lovesick but we are rooting for him to the final page. A book to curl up with in these darkening days.