Fictional bio of composer has Liberace-like style
In his biography of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, Brian Rees mentions a music historian’s memorable jab — “In 1921, Saint-Saëns died, full of years and malice” — while noting the French composer’s remarkably swift passage from acclaim to neglect. A fantastically fictional account of the life and times of this prodigy with a divisive temperament, New Brunswicker Chris Eaton’s “Symphony No. 3” has virtually no interest in making a weighty contribution to the debate over Saint-Saëns’ ultimate merit.
In fact, the musician who often comes to mind while reading dense, highly mannered passages in “No. 3” is a Wisconsin-born American — Liberace. Yes, he of the appliquéd mink capes, baroque mirrored homes, and quips (“I love the fake”). Ornate, flamboyant, assertively make-believe, Eaton’s survey of SaintSaëns’ work, loves and adventures is narrated by his brother — a man “largely ignored” and “generally considered talentless.” Disgruntled, petty and occasionally vindictive, the brother confides, “I … might have even been described as happy, if anyone had ever taken notice of me at all, or if happiness were a real thing.” Contrary to the novel, history records Saint-Saëns as an only child.
In the overwrought telling, the brothers’ years were stuffed with events including a fatal mugging, decadent feasts (recollected in detail: “We sat down to cobra ovaries with a sauce made from raw cashews, a platter of scorpions and spiders…”), and swimming naked in a sturgeon tank with a slumming Queen Victoria. The brother’s total recall of each and every occasion favours grotesque minutia: “The road was sticky with slime, the palsied houses rotten from chimney to cellar, leaning together apparently by the mere coherence of their ingrained corruption. Uneasy shadows passed and crossed, the human vermin in this reeking sink like goblin exhalations from all that is noxious around.”
A tic of the narrator, that exhaustive listing — of meals, concerts, fossils, places, musicians (“Taillefere, Milhaud, Durey, Cocteau; there was Canteloube; there was Auric; there was Poulenc …”), “fantastic creatures,” and yet more affluent, eccentric, or bizarre people (fabulists all) — accompanies a plot about brothers travelling the continents in search of “more authentic experiences.”
All the while, the composer strives to get over Henri, an enthusiastic lover with whom he once spent “days together in bed” in an apartment that “smelled of sex and Henri’s large black mastiff, Legraine.” Tasty in small bites and impressive as an antic literary performance, the novel’s structure gradually buckles under the sheer mass of extravagant decoration. As with Liberace’s mirror walls etched with Aubrey Beardsley drawings, sensory overload produces diminishing returns.