Strung along
The story of a luthier’s pursuit of love and happiness is an assured and rewarding read.
Grace Atherton is a cellist whose dreams of being a professional musician were crushed by a bullying tutor. In middle age, she’s doing nicely as a luthier, but her passion is David, a married man with whom she is having a long-term affair.
David is a touch too elegant and charming; you’ll suspect early on that he’s actually an arse, but it takes two unlikely friends, an old flame and a prestigious instrument-making competition to persuade Grace of that fact. And further, to
convince her that she deserves more.
It’s hardly an original arc, but Harris drops in a handful of genuinely shocking scenes, the sort that jolt you fully awake when you’re reading late at night. She also does a terrific job of portraying the subtle selfishness and power dynamic in play in the Grace/David relationship, drip-feeding detail until we’re properly seething. When David cries, you’ll want to throttle him.
Nicely done, too, are Grace’s lowest points. When she vomits stinking red booze onto a friend’s beautiful duvet, we’re right there with her, in a haze of sadness and self-loathing.
Vomit-soaked beds aside, the setting is rather lovely. Grace lives in a “chocolatebox pretty” English town and spends a lot of time scoffing pastries in Paris and knocking back Prosecco in Italy.
My quibbles are probably more to do with the editing than the writing. For example, the book is set now, and FaceTime and Twitter feature heavily, yet a teenager discusses CDs and videotapes as if they’re still a thing. Grace posts her elderly sidekick a pile of newspaper clippings instead of links, despite earlier marvelling at his deft use of an iPad.
And there are repeated crimes against “literally”. Bad: “It is, literally, now or never.” Worse: Grace’s friends were “ready to – literally if need be – hold me up at any time”. Excruciating: “My heart leaps, literally”. (There are more.) This would be fine if Grace was a ditz, but she’s not; she’s an intelligent, deliberate woman and every “literally” jars like an off-note.
On balance, however, this is an assured and rewarding read. The detail of instrument-making has much to do with this. Grace’s mastery of the finer points of varnish, glues and wood selection elevates the narrative and redeems her as a competent and composed woman – one who just happens to have an omnishambles of a personal life.
Harris does a terrific job of portraying the subtle selfishness and power dynamic in play in the Grace/David relationship.