Are you enriched by the Proms season? Check out the five book choices of The Open University’s Dr Joanne Reardon, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing. These tales feature the melodious golden threads of music and musical instruments as varied as the BBC Proms itself. From classical and opera to jazz and folk, these intensely human stories are woven around the music that forms them.
1. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (published by Vintage, 1994)
The stunning setting for this novel takes the reader back to the Second World War in 1941, and the Greek island of Cephalonia occupied by Italian forces. This contemporary classic combines love, music and tragedy in equal measure and holds the reader until the last note is played.
It follows the story of young Italian officer Captain Antonio Corelli, posted there as part of the occupying forces and ostracised by the village he stays in.
He is sent to the home of the local doctor and his daughter, Pelagia – reluctant hosts of an ever-visible enemy. All Corelli wants is to see out a peaceful war and go back to his music.
The talented musician uses his mandolin, his most treasured possession, to win over his hosts who begin to see a cultured, intelligent young man whose ability to produce the most exquisite music starts to break down the barriers between them.
Corelli falls in love with Pelagia and their uncertain future, against the background of war and resistance, begins to unravel. Tragic and comic by turns, this tale of love and music, made into a movie in 2001, is as fragile as the peace that Corelli craves so much.
2. Music and Silence by Rose Tremain (published by Vintage 1999)
It’s 1692. Lutenist Peter Claire arrives at the Danish court to join King Christian IV’s Royal Orchestra. This book is an example of what music achieves so finely in fiction, drawing on our senses and emotions so you believe you are listening to the music itself.
Demark seems cut off from the world, cloaked in mists and darkness, the perfect setting for the drama of love and betrayal that unfolds. There are echoes of Hamlet’s Denmark here, in a royal court filled with secrets and lies and a king whose loneliness is soothed by the music played solely for him.
This richly populated novel features Queen Kirsten, bored with marriage to the monarch, she flagrantly conducts illicit love affairs, a contrast to the gently unfolding love blossoming between Peter and the Queen’s servant, Emilia.
Their story forms the centre of a tender and beautiful novel with music the glue that binds the fates of the characters within it.
3. Nocturnes, a collection of short stories, by Kazuo Ishiguro (published by Faber & Faber 2009)
This collection is like listening to a piece of music in five movements that tell of love and loss building and fading with subtle shifts in the register of the writing as the different instruments are introduced: a guitar, a saxophone, a cello.
There’s humour too in these gently affecting stories that reflect life in all its shades. Alarmingly honest narrators grapple with memory, the passing of time and the regret of not having reached the potential they hoped for in their lives.
They take the reader from a café piazza in Venice, where we meet a faded crooner trying to rescue his failing marriage, to a London suburb and the seclusion of the Malvern Hills in summer.
There follows a trip to a luxury Hollywood hotel and a return visit to the same Venice piazza as themes and threads of stories, along with some of the characters, repeat themselves like the recurring melody of a song.
Ishiguro’s exquisite writing, both heartbreaking and humorous, will leave you wanting more, long after the music is finished.
4. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (published by Harper 2001)
This thrilling novel delivers a love story from the unlikely setting of the dramatic events of terrorists descending on the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru in 1996.
Ann Patchett brings her succinct trademark charm to create a thrilling narrative worthy of the most dramatic opera featuring famous opera diva character Roxane Coss.
Lured by the scent of money, she sings at the birthday party of the opera-mad vice-president of a Japanese electronics company who is hoping to secure investment through having her perform at the party.
Terrorists end her performance bringing madness and destruction but their intended target, the Japanese-born president, is absent leaving the terrorists without a plan. A fraught political drama unfolds over which no one has control.
Like the best opera, Bel Canto combines tragedy and comedy in equal measure. Confined within the claustrophobic walls of the embassy building, captors and captives realise that events have spiralled out of control, their lives now governed by fate, not reason.
Bel Canto means ‘beautiful singing’ and Patchett gives us a hint of a future beyond this story tantalisingly close but like the most haunting aria, just out of reach.
5. Jazz by Toni Morrison, (published by Alfred A. Knopf Inc 1992)
What all these books have in common is the theme of enduring love and its loss and this final reading suggestion is no exception.
Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking novel Jazz, the second of a triology, uses the African-American experience of 1920’s America to explore its themes of love and loss but also in its passionate intensity, doesn’t shy from the violence that can come with this.
It’s a powerful, lyrical read where jazz music is ever present running beneath the surface of Morrison’s poetic prose. Unusually, the reader is given all the facts from the outset before the narrator explores what happened, moving back and forth in time to uncover the story.
The novel centres on the relationship between middle-aged couple Violet and Joe, and Joe’s lover 18-year-old Dorcas, who is killed by him in a shooting, and Violet’s violent revenge.
The struggle between overwhelming love and jealousy underlined by the anger of racial injustice pervades every page of this novel where the rhythm of the prose is as seductive and entrancing as the music from which it takes its name.
Jazz itself is a character in this novel in that it underpins everything from the language to the structure and style of the narrative. The language has the feel of improvisation yet everything sings to the same tune and melody.
If you love jazz and its roots as well as its melodies, if you love a haunting story of love and tragedy then this is the one for you.
