Donald Greig’s first novel is a fluent knitting together of three distinct worlds: American musical academia, London professional singing and the life of a 15th-century composer. It is also something of a whodunnit, involving secret codes in combustible medieval manuscripts alongside skullduggery between some very famous historical characters.
If this sounds like a remake of The Name of the Rose, it is a lot funnier. Greig is at pains to say that all the musicologists he knows are genuinely effective people, but one would be forgiven for doubting it if his main character is anything to go by. Over-earnest academics are sitting targets, of course, but the fall and rise of this one is a delight to follow.
Greig has a gift for drawing characters as much as he has for pacing his set-pieces. All three of the worlds he sketches ring true, but of the three it was surely the one set in the 15th century which was the hardest to recreate. Here he tells the story of a (fictitious) 34-voice canon which the great Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem wrote as his swan song, as described in the diary of one of his former choirboys, remembering the facts of the case in later life.
Time Will Tell turns on the jealous nature of the equally significant Flemish composer, Josquin des Prèz, and the destructive consequences of this on Ockeghem’s masterpiece. Greig has caught the style of his late-medieval diarist as expertly as he has created the world of his present-day singers as they travel from gig to gig, falling in love, arguing, eating and drinking, following the cricket at all times of the day and night, just as singers do.
It is as a study in character that this thriller should be enjoyed, not as an academic by-product. Nonetheless, given the care with which Greig has drawn his background, I wonder how he managed to misidentify the Josquin mass whose third Agnus involves retrograde canon.
I wonder also whether it is satisfactory to trash the character of a very great musician, on essentially no historical evidence, for fictional purposes. And is it then disingenuous to claim that a book which includes historical characters is entirely fictional? Portraying Josquin as such a villain that a class of modern students is turned against his music makes me uneasy, though his aggressive character clearly adds bite to the narrative.
In the end, however, I shall savour this book for its description of what can happen when professional singers meet equally professional academics, both sides assuming as if by divine right that they know all about the music they are sharing. This is exactly how it is.
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