The Variations pulses in a host of different registers
Novel about music isn't (always) about talent gone awry
A good chunk of Patrick Langley's brainy, sensitive second novel, The Variations, is set at the Agnes's Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, a curious London institution sinking into decrepitude and disrepute. Its patients are musically talented but oddly stalked by voices clamouring in their heads.
But despite its eerie neo-gothic setting, The Variations has a charm and warmth that echo its intentions: Langley aspires to make the power of music tactile, to explore why it has such a pull on us. Central to his explorations is the Agnes's most famous alumna, Selda Heddle, a late-20th-century cause célèbre in the classical world — a rare female composer to achieve such heights. She has recently been found dead in a blizzard in rural England. Soon after, her grandson, Wolf, arrives at the hospice in a panic, before lapsing into a coma.
Langley, a British art critic, has a knack for stylistic and structural playfulness; he also has some savvy knowledge of contemporary composers. Langley evokes the mathematical, Philip Glassian structures of Selda's work, inspired and undermined by the voices in her head (sometimes they're singsongy, sometimes bawdy). According to the Agnes staff, those voices — which they call “the gift” — are typically those of ancestors demanding attention, though sometimes they're just delivering a melody aching to be heard. The medley of sounds is to the novel's benefit: The Variations pulses in a host of registers. The book is by turns funny, elegiac and crude, filled with the kind of chatter that might erupt when you open, as Selda thinks, “a clear channel” between the living and the dead.
Though other characters get their turn, it's Selda who sets the book's tempo. She's prickly, easily upset and diva-like, but she has a force. “I'll give you a music degree in two words,” she tells a class of music students at one point. “Tension and release.” It's a strategy that works for this novel, as well. Its gothic touches are offset by its almost romantic vision of musical creation; its scenes of hereditary madness are braided around a British dry humour. When Selda gets into a mental squabble with her gift, the mood is at once pathetic and funny: “Bring it to me, she says. Find it, the gift replies.”
Novels about the classical music world tend to be tales of artistic torment.
Langley isn't playing that game — he writes about music not strictly as a source of genius gone awry but as a crucible of melody and history. Music, like our pasts, can be played with, remixed and shaped into new forms. To that end, The Variations is a curious but vibrant celebration of the unruliness of music. The “gift” isn't unique to music, of course; it's a symbol of every bit of inspiration in our lives and how they occasionally drive us to distraction.