This book is, I think, a masterpiece. It tells the story of the elderly Elgar travelling up the Amazon on a cruise steamer to Manaus. He has decided to do this on a whim, to escape from music. He feels he cannot compose any more, he loathes being called upon to talk about music, and he holds in contempt those who lionise him. As the journey proceeds, his own character and his relationship both to his past and his country are developed with marvellous subtlety. He is vain, greedy for applause while reserving the right to despise it, and yet he is a genius, who has single-handedly managed a renaissance in English music - but alas, at the wrong time: for the First World War lays waste the Edwardian summer and afterwards, serious music moves elsewhere and he is dated, stranded…
In Playing With Waterpbk £6.99, Hamilton-Paterson remarks that the English are ‘obsessed with loss’. In Manaus, Elgar meets the incarnation of loss, and in coming to terms with his past he comes to terms with his present. But the price of his reconciliation seems to be his genius. Going home, he is no longer an uneasy artist but just a clubable old man. The structure of the book – the journey itself - is a rich and elegant counterpart for Elgar’s moral journey. Both the physical descriptions and the expressions of the artist’s crisis are utterly convincing. This as near perfect a novel as I know. - review by Johnny de Falbe
This book is, I think, a masterpiece. It tells the story of the elderly Elgar travelling up the Amazon on a cruise steamer to Manaus. He has decided to do this on a whim, to escape from music. He feels he cannot compose any more, he loathes being called upon to talk about music, and he holds in contempt those who lionise him. As the journey proceeds, his own character and his relationship both to his past and his country are developed with marvellous subtlety. He is vain, greedy for applause while reserving the right to despise it, and yet he is a genius, who has single-handedly managed a renaissance in English music - but alas, at the wrong time: for the First World War lays waste the Edwardian summer and afterwards, serious music moves elsewhere and he is dated, stranded…
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