The world of big brother

If the past is a foreign country, who governs it? Who has the right, particularly in dealing with his parents and siblings, to patent very private memories, and sell them to the public? These are questions that generally nag at the readers of family memoirs, and it is a measure of the quality of The Music Room that it does not provoke them. William Fiennes is driven neither by self-indulgence nor a desire to rub salt into old wounds, but by an urge to comprehend and dignify the past, in its joys and its sorrows; to give it shape and meaning.

This is, essentially, a prequel to The Snow Geese, Fiennes’s highly-acclaimed, prize-winning first book in which he recorded a journey, both physical and spiritual, undertaken in his late twenties. The Music Room reaches further into his past, exploring his childhood and adolescence in the moated Oxfordshire castle in which his forebears have lived since the 14th century. Without a whiff of snobbery, he conjures up an Arcadian infancy. In springtime, he soars on his swing up into the branches of the copper beech, where ‘the young leaves were translucent and looked like the skins of red grapes stretched on fish bones’. In summer, a local school comes to perform Twelfth Night in the garden, and the moat becomes the sea around Illyria. At night, in bed, he listens to his mother practising her viola, ‘each scale like someone coming up the stairs, then going down them again on second thoughts’. Fiennes has a poet’s gift for creating images that are fresh and original, and yet so natural as to seem almost inevitable. His narrative glides from the past to the present tense, as his memories absorb him.

But in this idyll, there is anguish. Fiennes’s elder brother, Thomas, was killed in an accident two years before Fiennes was born.