An Equal Music

Rating:
Summary: False Notes, alas
Review: As a music-lover, amateur musician, Anglophile and devoted fan of "A Suitable Boy", I expected great things from this book. The basic ingredients seemed so promising: a peek into the lives of professional musicians and a tribute to the joys of classical music. Unfortunately, this book just didn't take off for me.

There is the odd moment when Seth's feted "poetic prose" lifts the book, but only for a moment. Most of the time it just plods along. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why the book fails. My one take is that his characters, particularly the central character of Michael, do not ring true. Having lived a few years in England, I presumptuously think I know what I'm talking about when I say that Michael and company just don't feel like genuine British folk, who are anyway notoriously complex and difficut to get down right. The characterisations are unconvincing, and the dialogue sounds false to my ear. Perhaps "A Suitable Boy" and "The Golden Gate" worked better because they sprang respectively from his own home experience, and his years living and studying in California. Perhaps he need to restrict the exercise of his undoubted talents to settings for which he has an intuitive and innate feel for.

Perhaps another reason why this book fails is because it has nothing truly original to say; but neither did "A Suitable Boy", which was gripping notwithstanding it simply related realistic happenings in ordinary lives - which brings me back to my original theory which is that it is Seth's inadequate feel of the characters which inhibits him in "Equal Music". Many complain of the whineyness of Michael, but it is entirely Mr Seth's prerogative to create a whimpy character if he so wishes. His failure rather is in that he does not make me sympathise with Michael, as a skilled writer in full exercise of his prowess surely could with even fundamentally unsympathetic characters. Finally, perhaps it is hard to get into the emotional stream of the book unless one is very familiar with all the various pieces of music; Milan Kundera in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" was a lot more successful in his use of Beethovan's Fifth Symphony as a metaphor, but then everyone knows That bit of music. Perhaps Bach's Art of the Fugue is too obscure.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written, and perfect for chamber music lovers
Review: Unlike most of the other reviewers of this book, I love Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., and have loved them for many years. So I have no patience with those who talk about the main character, Michael Holmes, as a whiner or as immature. Of course he is these things. So what? The fact is, Vikram Seth has given us very plausible characters who act with passion, who are driven by the need to find the exquisite, and who are changed forever by their encounters with this passion. And who among us haven't acted dumbly when we think we are in love and that love goes bad and our lives go bad with it? I know I have. I know I've been selfish, dumb, self-pitying. But these days it's a sin to give in to emotions. One must behave like a "healthy" person, move on, take Prozac, and just get over it. I wonder if all artists, musicians, and novelists were always "rational" and just "got over" things, would great and meaningful art ever be able to be created through such a "rational" mind? In any case, this novel is a great entertainment, beautifully composed and easy to read. I think its ending is just fine. I admit there were parts that could have been better edited, redundancies that made me impatient with Michael and Julia, but these were minor flaws in a fine novel that accomplishes a whole lot. I was very happy to meet all its characters and live among them for a while. I even went off to my local music store and got the Haydn string quartet that Michael loved so much. I highly recommend this novel to anyone, but especially to those who love Bach and chamber music.

Rating:
Summary: Only Muzak.
Review: Having been recommended to read this by two acquaintances, one a music lecturer and the other a music PhD, it was a big disappointment. Basically, it's a potboiler dressed up with often badly misunderstood waffle about music and sold as serious literature. And it's also whiny, moody, depressing, cringeing, and lacks credibility. Jilly Cooper's music-based novels were almost more realistic - they were certainly 'livelier'!

Rating:
Summary: A Complete Novel
Review: It takes a great deal of Vikram Seth's prowess, and brutal sincerity in his fictional character's own words, to make a character like Michael Holme appealing (or, in some cases, even redeemable). Seth does manage this, and more, in one of the most well-plotted and balanced novels I've read in a while. The prose is generally spare, telling about instead of describing many people, objects and experiences, as one might expect a musician to in a first-person novel. But when music or profound emotions surface, the prose sort of dives into some of the most appropriate, musical, visceral, and ultimately believable prose poetry I've read. The effect, for me, was that I could not stall my evaluation of Michael at the level of his character flaws, becuase I was almost forced to share his joys and pain through the strength of the writing. I'll have to give it another read before I start thinking about Seth's thematic or moral point, but this is absolutely convincing, complete fiction. Ostensibly a story or rekindled love, I found myself caring very differently about that plot at that end of the novel than at the beginning, and perhaps a bit less than about the other two major subplots. If you enjoy this and would like to read another extraordinarily literate treatment of a similar story, also try David Payne's "Early From the Dance."

Rating:
Summary: Just one more rewrite, please
Review: I loved A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth so I really expected this book to be a complete pleasure to read. I regret to report that it was not.

I would have to say that An Equal Music is perhaps the most uneven book I have ever read. There are large parts of the book that are lyrical, filled with prose that sings. Seth uses every technique to bring music and rhythm to his words, alliteration, assonance and rhythm. Some of his sentences are made of syncopated short stabbing words, others are lento, with long, languorous words filled with vowels. You can hear music when you read.

That's a good thing because he is writing about music and he does that beautifully.

An Equal Music is an interesting story about Michael Holmes, a second violinist in a respected, but not famous, quartet who has two loves in his life. Julia, a woman he loved when he was a student in Vienna, and his violin, a Tononi that is his only on loan from his childhood music teacher.

His life is filled with music, he makes a living doing what he loves and he is relatively content, but for his regret at losing Julia (through his own actions, mind you) and his love for his violin that isn't truly his.  His life comes to a crisis when he meets Julia again and at nearly the same time learns that he will have to relinquish his violin to its owner, who is planning to pass it on to her nephew.

There's a lovely story here. You will care about Michael and Julia and the violin and want and hope for the best for them -- though they may have different ideas on what's best.  This isn't a book with a great happy ending, but it's not a tragedy either. It's more life-like and alive than that. It's resolution is a messy and compromised as life is and is, because it seems so true, a satisfying conclusion.

Moreover, it's a pleasure to read most of the time. I love reading books where I sense the author thought about the words he put down -- thinking not just does this word express my intent, but also how does this word sound and how does it relate to the words next to it, do they sound well together.  Is is beautiful?  For most of this book, the writing is beautiful.

On the other hand, I would like to tear entire pages out of this book and toss them in the trashbin. Most of the sections I would excise are tedious conversations that do not carry the story forward, do not reveal anything new about the characters and are, in fact, just plain alien to the story.

In fact, every bit of this book that I thought tedious and humdrum was dialogue.

Some examples, a pivotal scene between the main character Michael and Julia, his one true love, veers into a fracas with a policewoman about stepping on the grass.  There are more than a half dozen scenes where Michael acts like a total jerk with stewardesses, ticket attendents, waiters, wrong number dialers and policewomen. Perhaps Seth wants us to know about the immature and selfish side of Michael, but he already made that point in Michael's actions toward his current lover at the beginning of the book, his Vienna music teacher and  with his fellow Maggiore Quartet members. His ability to be a jerk from time to time needed no reinforcement with these tedious scenes.

Some of his conversations with the Quartet are interesting and illuminating insights into how musicians perceive music, but the vast majority are banal. Perhaps Seth wants readers to understand that artists can be banal, too. He could do that with a few conversations, but he overdoes it to the point that the dialogue often seems pointless.

I would also like to tear out about half the sections of the book where Julia and Michael are alone together. Their dialogue is often inane and repetitious. Some of that may be Seth trying to authentically represent conversation with a hearing impaired person, but it's still tedious. In any case, the worst of the repetition is not the misheard words, but the simple repetition of the same idea over and over and over.  In fact, some of their conversations could be cut and pasted seamlessly into one another.

Seth brilliantly lays out the pattern of their relationship in their tourist jaunts in Vienna and Venice. They head off in expectation and delight to see a sunrise and miss the boat and thus see a pretty sunrise, but not one framed with the absolute perfect beauty they were anticipating. One or two illustrations of anticipation, frustration and disappointment would be a brilliant exposition of their relationship, but Seth can't stop with a few examples. He packs each day of their trip with them. It was repetitious and, I believe, indicative of Seth's belief that his readers can't understand his point unless he hammers it into the ground.

Seth writes in an afterword that he can hardly bear to read his first draft over again. I think he should take some aspirin and plunge in and do it because then he would see his tendency to repeat himself and, I would hope, ruthlessly excise those repeated patterns, the redundant and dull dialogue and the pointless fracases with bystanders.  Then this book would be outstanding. As it is, it is good and worth reading, but it really needs one more rewrite.

Rating:
Summary: What a whiner!
Review: I am a self-proclaimed Vikram Seth fan - who would not be after such accomplishments as The Golden Gate and A Suitable Boy - which is why I am suffering from such acute disappointment after reading his latest. The beginning may cause you to believe this novel has potential after all. Seth's knowledge of music, both the appreciation of music and the industry of making music is quite evident and does an acknowledged service to the novel. However, the plot of the novel involving the "protagonist" Michael and his old flame Julia quickly turns Seth's possible literary accomplishment into nauseating melodrama. Michael continuously whines about the state of his life both before he reunites with Julia and during their torrid rekindling of romance. This is ironic since most of what Michael whines about occurred as a result of his own actions. Julia's hearing loss should have come across as utterly tragic considering her once burgeoning music career. Instead, the tragedy is used as a mere plot device: I felt little sympathy for Julia as she constantly swayed from Michael to her husband and back again. By the end, I could barely contain myself from screaming "STOP WHINING!" to Michael. Enough said. Most readers will be daunted by A Suitable Boy's length but I would suggest this in place of An Equal Music for anyone interested in checking out this author.

Rating:
Summary: Lyrical, Melodious, and a Bit Fuzzy
Review: The "word-smithing" is very fine -- beautiful at times -- quite poetic. Occasionally, the music and other references are somewhat vague to the standard reader, and the plot is a bit fuzzy-wuzzy for my taste. I keep seeing Ralph Fiennes playing Michael, with all those mournful close-ups for which his movies are famous. The love story between the humans is old hat; the love story between humans and music, instruments, dead composers, and settings where their notes are played is much more interesting. Nonetheless, I'd recommend it to friends, especially those who love music and/or nice crafting of words. The CD enhances one's reading a great deal.

Rating:
Summary: Boy loses girl ... Boy plays the violin ...
Review: This must be one of the most successful literary con games of the post-war era. I have actually talked to intelligent and otherwise discerning people who thought this was a great novel.

In fact, it is no more than another boring romance pretending to be literature. It is mostly carelessly written. The author actually waxes lyrical about 'panther black hair' (or was it eyes?) two pages after he writes about a 'panther black motor car'. Early in the book one of his lovers (the one with the panther black something, I think) actually 'looks delicious'. Please... Characters are either stock or singularly unlikeable, the plot is bordering on silly (with badly patched bits from almost anyone notable - from Stendhal to Greene), and the dialogue reads as if people were talking with word processors in their mouths.

To tell the truth, I would not have been that harsh if so much fuss (not the least from the author himself) wasn't made over this piece of forgettable fluff. Seth claimed in an interview that it took him seven years to write the book. I was going to say "get a real job, Vikram" but thought better of it. Perhaps he already has one - in marketing...

Rating:
Summary: "And then--years later--he saw her again!"
Review: That about sums up the basic plot to Seth's AN EQUAL MUSIC, and if it sounds like the description of a Forties Ingrid Bergman movie, well, that's right on the mark. Indeed, you might even follow that up with, "But she was carrying... A SECRET!" The initial plotline of the novel is almost hopelessly hokey, and unfortunately allows Seth to indulge in some rather moony scenes of the hero wallowing in his disappointed love. You should be warned that the hero and heroine eventually voyage (almost inescapably) to romantic locales like Vienna and Venice where they can swoon in the cities's glamor and romance while indulging in their guilty relationship.

But Seth is much too smart to let this hold him back too seriously. The story is actually more interesting than the M-G-M hokum might allow you to suppose: there's quite a great deal of interesting information about what it is like to work in a string quartet, how musicians prepare to perform, how a fugue is structured, etc. Best of all, Seth veers from the expected by the end of the novel as the narrator's despair sends him towards madness, allowing for some of the most unexpectedly adventurous writing Seth has ever set to paper. (Clearly, this looks to be a transitional novel for Seth as he moves away from his more crowd-pleasing mode of A SUITABLE BOY.)

Seth is a writer who is never afraid to be charming, and he usually succeeds at this (although you should be warned that he does fall into extreme preciousness at times, particularly when disucssing the spell music casts upon him and his characters--the concluding "Author's Note" is almost unreadable). Although this novel isn't nearly as enjoyable or satisfying as A SUITABLE BOY, it's evidence that Seth is at least trying new things, and perhaps moving towards a more mature phase in his fiction writing.

Rating:
Summary: Fresh and compelling
Review: This book is thoroughly researched and beautifully written. I am struck by how believably Seth has written two books (the other, A Suitable Boy) about such different characters and circumstances. His writing style is refreshing; he never goes overboard with poetics but often hits memorable turns of phrase. The only flaw I found was maybe a bit of room for more plot sizzle, aside from relying on the simple love story to carry the day. A very good book.