Of art and love
Efadul Huq loses himself in a story
LOVE is so musical that to the musician who has found love, Mozart would sound out of sync; so tender that the choicest muslin feels like a torn rug to the maiden who has discovered love. They say if love be the music of life let it play, so play on it is. This very love is the theme of the piece I am going to review today. And Vikram Seth comes like the Pied Piper of Hamelin playing the tune of love and casting a binding spell on each of you who possess a romantic soul. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to An Equal Music. Set in the glorious world of the European classical music circuit, An Equal Music is a sensitive, meticulous novel that has the delicacy of a haiku. Gone is the splendid sweep of A Suitable Boy. Seth's An Equal Music is an intimate story of love wrapped in melody. Michael, the lovelorn narrator, is a violinist in a London string quartet. He is in love with a memory: it has been years since he has seen Julia, a pianist with whom he fell in love while studying in Vienna. After so many years the memory takes a realistic shape and Michael crosses paths with Julia on a bus in London. The way Seth describes it here is very moving. Although she is married and has a son, soon their passion rekindles. Julia is no more the perfect person Michael knew her as. She is a deaf musician! Blended with the strokes of a Mozart piano, synced with a Bach Harmonica and a Schubert violin, An Equal Music is a treat for the connoisseur and the layman. There are many emotional twists and turns and at its best the book is a gripping and profound meditation on love, music and the irrevocability of time ("the swift ellipses of the earth," in Seth's masterful words). Narrated in the present tense, in an insistent first person, it is intensely personal, unlike anything Seth has previously written. The novel also has remarkable psychological portraiture. However, these portraits are not convincing at times. In places the narrative sometimes falters on the very quality that elsewhere glorifies it. The poetic language sounds archaic ("What hath closed Helen's eyes?") and the intensity can descend into generic even maudlin expressions of romantic anguish. "My life has shelved towards desolation," Michael whines and "If I didn't love you, things would be quite a bit simpler," says Julia. Well, they are just the risks you got to take while writing about art and love. It is certainly true that Seth has undertaken no small task in trying to distill something original from a subject that is almost by definition nonspecific and sentimental. "I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some sense was a challenge," he recently told an interviewer. In my words, he has overcome this challenge by An Equal Music, a tale that promises to touch its reader to the core! Efadul Huq is currently pursuing higher studies in the United States.
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