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Friday 9 January 2009

Private faces are wiser and nicer

Research produced, in Saturday, a brain surgeon whose thoughts while operating were completely incredible, and produces, here, a musician whose relationship to the art is quite unlike that of any musician one has ever met. Anyone who has played in an orchestra knows that professional musicians are a raucous, cynical and practically-minded lot, whose respect for their own art does not tend in metaphysical directions; under their breath they sing ‘Ha-ave you seen our Nellie make water?’ in the Tchaikovsky string serenade, and talk, mostly, about mouthpieces and fingering at the tea interval. This, on the other hand, is not how they think about music:

Because the instrument was a cello rather than her violin, the interrogator was not herself but a detached observer, mildly incredulous, but insistent too, for after a brief silence and a lingering, unconvincing reply from the other instruments, the cello put the question again, in different terms, on a different chord [sic], and then again, and again, and each time received a doubtful answer.

One can be sure from this that McEwan plays no musical instruments, and perhaps can’t even read music. The trouble is that his character can. Research can enable the knowledgeable flourishing of phrases like ‘pizzicato’ and ‘double-stopping’ and ‘partita’, but no more. Compare this sort of stuff with a really knowledgeable practitioner, in Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music; it is the difference between deep love and efficient research.

Research, too, has produced a historical setting which, rather like Atonement, shows you what you thought you knew about the period rather than surprising you at any point. By chance, I was reading Kingsley Amis’s Take A Girl Like You immediately before On Chesil Beach, and was struck by the difference between a contemporary account of sexual mores and that perpetrated by a historical novel. A small anthology of dug-up early-1960s clichés could be furnished from this short novel.

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