Local author tells complex tale of terror

Terrorism and its cousin, political repression, aren’t far from the surface in the subtle, affecting first novel by Margot Singer, a professor of English at Denison University.

In “Underground Fugue,” the quiet lives of the four principal characters, whose voices weave together to create a complex story, have all been affected, at least tangentially, by terror.

Esther, a Jewish New Yorker whose teenage son has recently died and who is now in London nursing her dying mother, lived through the events of 9/11. Her mother, Lonia, managed to make it out of Czechoslovakia during Hitler’s rise to power with the help of her scheming future husband.

Lonia’s next-door neighbor, Javad, is a divorced neurosurgeon whose childhood home in Iran has irrevocably changed. His “stubbornly opaque” son Amir, a college student with an interest in Middle Eastern history, is drawn into questionable company and spends long nights exploring the London subway system.

Running parallel to the story of their intersecting lives is that of a man in a dissociative fugue, a pianist found wandering on a British beach, on whose case Javad is consulted.

Outwardly, not a lot happens in the novel, at least at first.

Esther plays the piano, smokes a lot of cigarettes, and wonders whether she has left her husband for good. Lonia, drifting in a morphine daze, remembers bits and pieces of her past. Javad worries about his son and becomes interested in Esther. Amir wanders through vacant tunnels and into a mosque.

The plot lines converge at the London Underground bombings of 2005, but not in an obvious way.

If the “underground” of the title has to do with the subway system, it refers just as strongly to the semi-conscious lives of the characters, whose barely realized desires and memories shape their lives in ways they don’t always see.

Likewise, “fugue” has a double meaning: It’s that dissociative state the characters all experience to one degree or another, and it’s also the musical form in which themes — like the character’s lives or stories — play off of one another.

Like the title, the novel shimmers between meanings, never settling on a single one. It fades to a close, without a big bang, and continues to reverberate in the mind after its final words.