A fitting novel for our times, an engaging read
Deals with loss of reputation and ‘the way myth seeps into real life’
THE blurb on the back cover of this book tells us that it is “lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, The Melody tracks the few days that will see Busi and the town he loves altered irrevocably.
“This is a story about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too – a rallying cry to protect those we persecute.” Indeed a fitting novel for us today.
The Melody opens with oncerenowned concert singer and composer Alfred Busi (Mr Al) attacked by a mysterious nocturnal creature scavenging in his larder.
As the creature races past him in the dark, he is bitten on the hand, neck and mouth. In his confusion he is left with the pungent memory of his assailant’s earthy, sweaty potato-peel odour. Instead of calling the police, he calls his late wife’s sister to tend his wounds. And so the scene is set for an extraordinary sequence of events.
Crace (Harvest, Quarantine) is true to form and Busi’s unnamed town feels as if it could be Mediterranean, with its basilica, domes and balconies, though the coast could be American or English. Busi’s wooden seaside villa is backed by a rocky rise and bosk – an “almost-wilderness”. We read that there are strange varieties of both plants and animals in these wild areas.
And, myth has it that there may even be Neanderthals or some other species of not quite humans. “My books,” says Crace, “dislocate the reader rather than locate them. The coastal town where The Melody is set combines elements of several places, but I want it to feel real enough that the reader feels they could go there.”
So much for the place, what of the melody itself, Busi loved to lie in bed at night and hear the tinkling sound of the string of little Persian bells that Alicia, his wife, had hung on the larder door.
They would tinkle when she pottered downstairs for a midnight snack. He loved his wife dearly and misses her endlessly.
He attempts to catch in music this love by echoing the sound of the bells.
This book is slightly disconnected in the way it is narrated by a nameless person who, in the second part, becomes Busi’s tenant in his vastly changed life.
The villain of the piece is Joseph, Busi’s nephew, who buys up the old villa and builds apartment blocks while at the same time “clearing out” the bosky areas of town.
The Melody has its political undertones in that it addresses current concerns: from xenophobia, the fragmentation of communities, the relentless destruction of our environment in the name of progress and, not to forget, the extermination of other species.
Indeed a fitting novel for us today as well as an engaging read.