Autumnal northern lights

Where are the songs of Spring? Well, certainly not in these short stories about people in crabbed old age or looking hard at death. Only in the last one, ‘The Silence’, where an ancient composer who believes that ‘the logic of music is eventually silence’, is any longing expressed to see ‘the cranes fly south again’ towards the wine-growing countries that nourished Beethoven, not these where ‘soured milk rules the roost’.