99 YEARS OLD AND STILL PERSNICKETY ABOUT BOOKS...
SOME months ago, I wrote of my infuriation at Waterstones not, for once, at the omission of the apostrophe in their name but at their excuse for not stocking the paperback book I was seeking.
The book in question was Shouldn’t You Be In School, the third volume in Lemony Snicket’s All The Wrong Questions series, and the reason they gave was it hadn’t been published yet.
That, I thought, and expressed to them in forceful terms, was the feeblest excuse I had ever heard. I had read the first two volumes and become immersed in the nefarious goings-on in the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea that formed the book’s plot, and was very eager to find out what happened next.
Yet Waterstones could not furnish me with the means to find out because “It hasn’t been published yet”. And now they have done it again. I finished book three long ago and have been patiently waiting for Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights? the final instalment of the story, which they now tell me will not appear in paperback until June 2.
I suppose I could pay more and get it in hardback but then it wouldn’t match my three paperbacks for the earlier books. However, (and here comes the good news) in the meantime I have had a delightful Lemony Snicket experience which has made the waiting more bearable and it came, remarkably enough, at the Royal Festival Hall during the recent celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
The event was a performance of Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead, which features a narrator and an orchestra. The text is a story in which a detective tries to get to the bottom of a mystery involving the murder of a composer. Every section of the orchestra is suspected and with good reason as the detective explains in their musical interludes.
The narrator at last month’s Festival Hall concert was the wonderful Nicholas Parsons, who is almost as old and wise as I am.
He spoke his words without hesitating, repeating himself or deviating, except once when he came in with a line criticising the string players earlier than intended.
The first violins, incidentally, he said were there to play the tricky bits but the second violins were more fun at parties. Violas, however, just fill in the middle notes of harmonies, so nobody detects or appreciates what they are playing, which is a very convincing motive for killing the composer.
With the American composer Nathaniel Stookey providing the entertaining music, this all added up to a family concert that was so much more fun that Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra or even Prokofiev’s Peter And The Wolf. It takes a man of Snicket’s profundity to write something that really works for both adults and children. Do get to see it if you ever have the chance.
Spoiler: The detective said the conductor did it, on the grounds that he’s been murdering composers all his life. But the orchestra were willing accomplices.