Women’s voices — musical, critical, lyrical,
Musicians from different worlds forge a powerful friendship
An unlikely but powerful friendship founded on a mutual love of music animates Under the Visible Life, Kim Echlin’s first novel since The Disappeared, which was shortlisted for 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
The friends at the heart of the story are Mahsa and Katherine, two jazz pianists from radically different backgrounds. Mahsa is the daughter of an American engineer and an Afghani mother who marry against her family’s wishes and flee to Karachi, Pakistan, together. The birth of Mahsa only deepens their attachment, but the couple are tracked down and murdered by Afghani relatives when Mahsa is 13.
Taken in by her tradition-bound uncle and aunt, Mahsa plays the role of the duty-bound female relative while secretly cultivating her love for the jazz and blues music her father played on the piano for her and her mother. When she is allowed to leave Pakistan to attend university in Montreal, Mahsa disobeys her uncle’s wishes and switches her studies to the music department, an indulgence that will eventually cost her dearly.
While still a student, Mahsa meets Katherine on a trip to New York City. Katherine is a pianist of minor renown in the city’s explosive jazz scene and, like Mahsa, is the product of a mixed-race relationship, her white Canadian mother having fallen in love with a Chinese migrant worker in1940, when such relationships violated several taboos. Although she is raising three children largely on her own (the father is an often-absent, heroin-addicted sax player), Katherine refuses to abandon her musical career and is determined to record an album of her jazz compositions.
Their friendship endures through the ensuing decades, the women forming a jazz duo and continuing to collaborate even after Mahsa is forced to marry a Pakistani man 20 years her senior.
The novel is narrated, in alternating sections, by Katherine and Mahsa, a narrative device that readers may find initially jarring due to Echlin’s uncertain handling of Mahsa’s voice. Katherine comes alive on the page as soon as she introduces herself to readers. She is brash, unapologetic, but also smart and quietly romantic, especially about music and musicians.
Perhaps because Katherine is born and raised in Canada, Echlin feels no need to hold her at arm’s length as she initially does Mahsa, who seems almost too noble and forgiving to be real. Mahsa is the orphan of murdered parents forced to live under the thumb of a domineering, tradition-bound uncle, and yet she remains a bastion of calm and wisdom. Even on the rare occasions when she expresses anger, that rage does not contaminate Mahsa’s essential goodness.
It’s hard to fault Echlin too much for turning the soft-focus lens on Mahsa, as Canadian readers seem to demand that persons displaced by war, poverty or political upheaval be wise, noble beings purified by their suffering. The facts are rarely so life-affirming. Suffering and trauma rarely ennoble; they wear down the nerves and deepen neuroses, and are more likely to strengthen one’s Inner Tyrant than one’s Inner Saint.
Once Mahsa crosses paths with Katherine, she gains the confidence, both as a woman and as a narrator, to express a broader range of emotion and agency. From then on, her story becomes as engrossing as Katherine’s, and the novel carries readers through an impressive cavalcade of personal and societal changes. Echlin is that rare writer who can evoke the joy of playing and listening to music without resorting to overly abstract language or fussy metaphors.
The closing chapters are moving and elegiac, earning the emotional kick Echlin clearly wants readers to take away with them.