Hell and Back Read online

  Sentimental Education

  [Vikram Seth]

  Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet is to be ‘supported, we hear, by a new release from the rock band U2. As if in coy echo, the promotional blurb to Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music tells us that ‘ bookstores have invited string quartets to perform during his readings’. Simultaneously? While the phenomenon of celebrity publishing has accustomed us to the idea that the book itself may be the least exciting part of an overall package, it is disturbing to find two authors with such literary ambitions allowing our eyes, or indeed ears, to be distracted from the pleasures of the text. The multimedia experience may be fashionable, but in literature distinction and discrimination are of the essence. One reads, for preference, in a quiet place.

  There are uncanny parallels between Rushdie’s and Seth’s latest efforts. Like chalk and cheese it seems impossible not to mention them together. Both books are by hugely successful, male, anglophone, Indian-born authors now in early middle age. Both feature musicians as protagonists. In each case those protagonists are involved in a love triangle. In each case the musician-lovers lose sight of each other for ten years allowing a third to slip in. Both first-person narrators seem driven to tell their story out of a sense of loss, the need to overcome pain and disillusionment. Much, very much, is made of the intimacy generated by creating music together and in both cases the music played comes to be seen as a manifestation of a transcendental realm of feeling. But while Rushdie, with his usual spirited bluster, seems set on giving back to the world only the cacophony the mind is anyway subject to these days, Seth is after more calculated and harmonious effects. The distance between the rock band in Central Park pushing amplification to the limits to drown out helicopters and sirens, and the tail-coated quartet entertaining a scrupulously silent, if somewhat dusty middle-class audience beneath a baroque ceiling rose, will serve well enough as an analogy for the distance between these two novelists’ performances.

  Vikram Seth’s reputation began with The Golden Gate. Here, some light-hearted satire and a series of sentimental relationships were rescued from banality by being presented entirely in tightly rhyming tetrameter. The effect, at least in the opening cantos, is charming. Unlike Rushdie, when Seth approaches his readers, it is always to seduce, never to accuse, even less to browbeat. But he is careful not to challenge either. Despite occasional lapses into doggerel, The Golden Gate slips down like a well-made ice cream. It would be churlish to raise objections and simply unkind to hazard comparison either with Pushkin, whom Seth names as his model, or Byron, of whom the reader, despite the different verse form, may more often be wistfully reminded. Even returning to the book today, one cannot help but take one’s hat off to someone who had the resources and tenacity to bring such a project to a conclusion and convince a publisher it would work.

  That hat-doffing admiration - the critical faculty forestalled by wonder - is something Seth once again sought and largely obtained with his second work of fiction, A Suitable Boy. Much was made at the time of its publication of the distance the author had travelled from The Golden Gate, from a good-humoured satire of contemporary California in chiming verse, to this vast, meticulously researched drama of India in the 1950s, the crimes and loves of four extended families in over 1,300 pages. But with hindsight the similarities between the two ventures are evident enough: first, the decision to ignore current experimental trends in literary fiction, particularly Anglo-Indian fiction, in this case by resorting to a conventional narrative prose that offered a tried and tested vehicle for pleasure; then, the gently satirical delight in social trivia with here the exoticism of the mainly Hindu milieu standing in for the wit of clever rhyme, and the sheer scale and intricate extension of the plot serving to generate that same gasp of disarmed surprise.

  At the thematic level, too, there was a similar concentration on affairs of the heart, again with an awareness of the dangers of passion and the virtues of traditional, in this case even dynastic, common sense. Unpleasantness and indeed horror are not excluded, but, as Anita Desai acutely remarked in her assessment of the book, Seth tends to hurry over the brutal and lurid as if such things were really too distasteful to occupy much space on his pleasurable pages.

  Since a great deal of contemporary fiction seeks primarily and often solely to shock, this decision to restrict unpleasantness to a minimum will hardly raise hackles. If a problem does arise it is when we begin to feel that Seth’s designs upon us are all too irksomely evident. There are readers whose antennae go up before succumbing to charm. Various Indian critics in particular suggested that A Suitable Boy’s complacent vision of Indian society verged on the grotesque. The desire to seduce must always be in complex negotiation with the spirit of truth. In this sense the decision, in An Equal Music to encourage us to look unhappiness long and hard in the eye might be seen as an attempt on Seth’s part to redress the balance.

  Narrator and protagonist Michael Holmes describes himself as ‘irreparably imprinted with the die of someone else’s being’. Unable, in his mid-thirties, to get over his first love of ten years before, he ‘lives in a numbed state of self-preservation’, in a tiny attic apartment to the north of Kensington Gardens, eking out a barely adequate living playing second violin in a string quartet and teaching the trade to a variety of unsatisfactory students with one of whom he pursues an affair that offers no more than physical relief. The book’s three brief opening paragraphs, which also form a separate section of their own, strike a melancholy and decidedly minor chord that is to be sustained, with variations, throughout.

  The branches are bare, the sky tonight a milky violet. It is not quiet here, but it is peaceful. The wind ruffles the black water to me.

  There is no one about. The birds are still. The traffic slashes through Hyde Park. It comes to my ears as white noise.

  I test the bench but do not sit down. As yesterday, as the day before, I stand until I have lost my thoughts. I look at the water of the Serpentine.

  Immediately we recognise the familiar sadness of the lonely man in the urban scene, trapped in empty repetition, eager to forget, clearly attracted to and menaced by that black water the wind blows at him. There is nothing remarkable here. We might even want to call it creditably low key. Gone the springy step of The Golden Gate, gone the sprawling exoticism of A Suitable Boy, the style now spare, sometimes wilfully limp, Seth thus renounces the visiting card of virtuosity. When we discover that his hero is not only white and English but that he hails from the town of Rochdale, a declining industrial satellite on the edge of the Manchester conurbation, the kind of place that tends to be the butt of dismissive jokes in the sophisticated South, it becomes clear that if there is to be a gasp of surprise this time around, it must be at Seth’s boldness in placing himself right in the mainstream of English fiction, doing exactly what the English do.

  Michael, then, is marooned in the past, “with inane fidelity fixated on someone who could have utterly changed’. Ten years ago, studying in Vienna, he fell in love with another student, Julia, a pianist. For a year things went well, but Michael’s music teacher was a harsh master and dissatisfied with his achievements. Despite Julia’s insistence that he see the experience through, Michael fled, leaving both girlfriend and the possibility of a solo career behind. When, two months later, he began to write to her, she did not reply.

  The exact dynamics of this break-up, the reasons for Julia’s not replying to Michael’s letters, for his not simply returning to see her, are never clear to the characters themselves and even less so to the reader. What evidently matters to Seth, however, is that it should appear an unnecessary separation in a relationship of enormous potential. Michael is thus more understandably in thrall to his sense of what might have been. To make matters worse, since he and Julia used to play together in a trio, his very vocation constantly brings him up against the memory of her. In particular there is a Beethoven trio they used to perform - opus 1 number 3 - that he often listens to but cannot
play either privately or professionally for fear of being overcome by emotion. Informed, significantly enough by Virginie, his student girlfriend, that Beethoven in later life prepared a now obscure variation of this early work as a quintet, Michael becomes obsessed with tracking the piece down and getting his quartet to perform it with the help of an extra player. This will both remind him of Julia, but at the same time be different from the past. I know,’ he thinks excitedly, ‘that, unlike with the trio, nothing will seize me up or paralyse my heart and arm.’

  Instead, then, of seeking a more appropriate sentimental variation with Virginie, Michael sets out to find this different and improbable version of what he remembers all too well. We are thus treated to one of those episodes, now so familiar in contemporary fiction, where someone searches for the crucial but elusive text in specialist libraries and second-hand shops, meeting with the predictable mixture of obnoxious obtusity and unhelpful helpfulness. Ironically, it is just as - at last successful - he boards a bus to bring home an old vinyl recording of the piece, ‘so desperately sought, so astonishingly found’, just as he prepares a decidedly sentimental, indeed potentially masturbatory (not a word Seth would use) evening with this variation - TU come home, light a candle, lie down on my duvet and sink into the quintet - that the lovelorn Michael sees, after ten years, who but Julia herself going by on a bus in the opposite direction. The variation, we immediately understand, is to be with the loved one in person. When Michael’s quartet do play the piece with a fifth artist, that artist will be Julia.

  But before considering how Seth tackles the revival of lost love, let’s turn aside a moment to look at his handling of the protagonist’s provincial boyhood, since this strand of the narrative offers in naked miniature an example of the writer’s aesthetic at work.

  Home of the Industrial Revolution, the north of England has a long and spirited tradition in socially engaged fiction. From Gaskell’s Mary Barton to the novels of contemporary writers like Pat Barker and Jane Rogers, first the ascendancy of the brutal factory owner, then the desolation of industrial decline, finally the gloom of government cuts and, throughout it all, the plight of the poor, have all been passionately documented. Seth is aware of this of course and as the dutiful Michael goes to visit his ageing father at Christmas, he offers us a number of pages in line with the tradition, portraying a disadvantaged boyhood in a decaying landscape.

  The handsome town hall presides over a waste - it is a town with its heart torn out. Everything speaks of its decline. Over the course of a century, as its industries decayed, it lost its work and its wealth. Then came the planning blight: the replacement of human slums by inhuman ones, the marooning of churches in traffic islands, the building of precincts where once there were shops. Finally two decades of garrotting from the government in London and everything civic or social was choked of funds: schools, libraries, hospitals, transport. The town which had been the home of the co-operative movement lost its sense of community.

  The only other colonial outsider I can think of who took on the industrial North was the Australian Christina Stead in Cotter’s England. With fantastic energy and mimetic resources, Stead achieved the astonishing feat of giving us a believable British working class chattering, suffering, living, laughing, loving and -she never forgets - hating as hard as could be. This is not Seth’s project. He does not risk the local dialect. Aside from these few pages, his hero displays no interest in politics or the condition of England. Nor does Seth. Why then bother with this reductive and potentially platitudinous picture of the North? Is it necessary for authenticity?

  Certainly Seth works hard to intertwine the history of the town with that of Michael’s family, mainly in order to present the latter as victims. His father’s butcher’s shop was appropriated to make way for a road which was never built. Bereft of his profession, the father fell ill. Nursing him, the mother suffered a fatal stroke. Over Christmas, Michael plans “to lay a white rose’ on the parking lot that eventually replaced the shop and family home: ‘the flat and I hope snow-covered site of my mother’s life’.

  Political and again poignant considerations also come into the account of Michael’s early education on the violin:

  Because the comprehensive I went to had been the old grammar school, it had a fine tradition of music. And the services of what were known as peripatetic music teachers were provided by the local education authorities. But all this has been cut back now, if it has not completely disappeared. There was a system for loaning instruments free or almost free of charge to those who could not afford them - all scrapped with the education cuts as the budgetary hatchet struck again and again … If I had been born in Rochdale five years later, I don’t see how I - coming from the background I did, and there were so many who were much poorer - could have kept my love of the violin alive.

  Cursory research is being made to work very hard here. Michael expresses commonplace views frequently fielded in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section of British newspapers. But to respond with the standard objection that in the same period the people of Lancashire have equipped themselves with cars, TVs and computers, that the consumption of beer, cigarettes and junk food could never be described as negligible, that though one would always applaud a government that provided violins to its people, the people themselves are hardly screaming for them - to raise this objection would simply be to miss the point. Seth doesn’t want to get us interested in the politics or economics of the situation. He himself is not at all interested in the question of how the north of England (where I was born and spent my infancy and sang indifferently in a marvellous choir) is to continue to produce musicians. He is careful never to give Michael any individual or thought-provoking views on the subject (Stead’s characters, on the contrary, always have excitingly personal views). No, the whole ‘northern thing’ has been taken over - Seth is adept above all at taking over old forms to his special purposes - only for the opportunity it offers to strike further chords of poignancy, further variations on the theme, or rather mood, so clearly announced in the book’s opening lines.

  Deprived as it may or may not be, the North is certainly generous in this regard: it gives our author, among other poignancies, the ageing, beaten father attached to his decrepit cat, the image of Michael as a boy lying on the Pennine uplands listening to the larks, and the wholesomeness of the dying benefactress who introduced Michael to music and who lends him her extremely valuable Italian violin, without which he would be hard put to do his job. At the end of the book he will crumble some home-made Christmas pudding onto the snowy moors in her memory.

  Admiring, if we will, the cleverness of this appropriation, we can now turn to the main plot with a proper sense of what Seth is up to. Everything will be arranged to generate the maximum poignancy: ‘issues’, whether moral, social or existential, will - like the decay of the North - be drawn on only in so far as they sustain the note on the heartstring, then rapidly dropped. Vienna will be the venue where it would be disastrous to fluff a concert. Venice will perform its traditional service as the right place to have a romantic interlude that is only an interlude. Even music itself, ostensibly the book’s great theme, will be understood first and foremost as a vehicle of sentiment. Thus, after the vision of the long-lost Julia on the bus, Michael, rehearsing the now highly significant quintet, remarks:

  For me there is another presence in this music. As the sense of her might fall on my retina through two sheets of moving glass, so too through this maze of notes converted by our arms into vibration - sensory, sensuous - do I sense her being again. The labyrinth of my ear shocks the coils of my memory. Here is her force in my arm, here is her spirit in my pulse. But where she is I do not know, nor is there hope I will.

  Wrong! Michael is wrong. For though on crowded Oxford Street he fails to catch up with Julia’s bus in time (Seth’s research letting him down here a little, one feels), the dear lady will turn up of her own free will at the end of the quartet’s concert at Wigmore Hall. There are
tentative, poignantly uncommunicative meetings. We discover that Julia is married, loves her husband, and has a son who goes to school only a stone’s throw from Michael’s flat. Thus understandably hesitant, nevertheless - for the old magic is at work and the plot must move on - she succumbs and the couple makes love. As they prepare to do so, watch how cleverly and tenderly the moral question is fielded:

  She smiles a little sadly. ‘Making music and making love - it’s a bit too easy an equation.’

  ‘Have you told him [the husband] about me? I ask.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what to do about all this subterfuge: faxes in German, coming up to see you here … but it’s really Luke [the son] who I feel I’m …’

  ‘Betraying?’

  ‘I’m afraid of all these words. They’re so blunt and fierce.’

  Indeed they are. But Julia need not worry, irony wouldn’t fit in with the particular effects Seth is after here. He will do his best to make sure that both characters remain not only sympathetic, but somehow innocent. That way we can savour their sadness without any irritating distractions. After all, this is not the ordinary affair where Dionysus bursts on to a tranquil scene and the hitherto placid weavers discover a dark side to themselves that they never imagined. The sex is toned delicately down. The Bach is turned decorously up. The lovers play music together. And are they not anyway entirely justified - if justification is required (they both seem to feel it is) - by the fact that this is old and unfinished business between proven soul mates? ‘I am not seeing anyone new,’ Michael truthfully tells the worried Virginie.