 |
 |
   |
|
|
|
|
Between Each BreathEditions
ReviewI liked this book very much. Quoting from Dombey and Son in his epigraph –“We are dreadfully real, Mr Carker, said Mrs Skewton; ‘are we not?’’ – Adam Thorpe announces that he has set out to write a story about the particular intensities of ordinary people. Jack Middleton, a composer, visits Estonia hoping to find inspiration for a piece he has been commissioned to write for the opening of the Dome. To his own astonishment, instead of inspiring music, the freedom he finds there causes him to have an affair with Kaja, a beautiful waitress. Convinced that this is a closed episode, he returns to London and his wife, Milly, and resumes his usual existence. His own origins are poor: he is a prodigy, born on a housing estate in Hayes, near Heathrow, where his parents still live; his mother is blind. But he married an heiress who now, at last, is expecting their first child. In anticipation of this longed-for event, they move from a large house in Richmond to a larger one beside Hampstead Heath. While the material benefits of his life sometimes disgust Jack, he is too comfortable to want to rebel. His wife’s wealth provides him with the leisure to compose. She is a desirable, kind woman with a robust social conscience. When she miscarries, she is distraught: her grief is persistent and moving, and she channels her energies into numerous projects for saving the planet. Jack often says that he ‘loves her to bits’ and this cliché is revealing because, in Thorpe’s hands, it signifies an unchallenged assumption: Jack hides behind the ready phrase, vaguely aware that his life would be very difficult if it were not true. But as their hopes for a baby fade, it becomes plainer that something is very wrong. It might not matter that his career is flagging if it weren’t that he knows, deep down, that the music he writes is not as good as it could be, and he minds this, and it makes him irritable about many aspects of his life. Into the sultry summer of 2005, just after the London tube bombings, Kaja reappears. Jack becomes aware of her through his friend, Howard, a viola teacher who tells him that he has a new pupil, a five-year-old prodigy from Estonia called Jaan. It soon transpires that his mother is Kaja, who has brought him to London to meet his father. The situation unsettles Jack. He would like to see Jaan and support Kaja financially, but even though she might still love him he doesn’t want to resume their affair. For while Milly might conceivably forgive him for his affair six years ago, he knows that Jaan’s existence would be unbearable to her. Every aspect of this tale is described with startling technical virtuosity and sensitivity, but it is fundamentally ordinary. Jack is complacent, lazy, foolish; the life he and Milly lead in Hampstead is far from heroic and Thorpe satirises it mercilessly. The spectacle of Jack sliding into chaos would be excruciating in the hands of a less able writer. But Thorpe makes it thrilling because he imagines every step of the slide with Dickensian love and animates each one with vivid personal detail. Milly’s richly portrayed kindness to others, and her conversational and sexual intimacy with Jack, generate enough sense of her integrity to make the reader sympathise acutely with her, in spite of all the Hampstead flim-flam. But the most strikingly imagined details concern Jack’s music. It is fitting that Thorpe should write a novel with a composer as the main character because, as he demonstrated in his first novel, Ulverton From a review in the 'Literary Review' - review by Johnny de Falbe |
|
John Sandoe [Books] Ltd |
Fax:
020 7581 2084