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This is a nice, easy novel -- an effortless trip. Successful because of the tenderness, imagery and wisdom and caution of the young Indian Calcutta-born writer, Vikram Seth. Caution because of the light way he deals with an immense subject: music. People appear, come, go, materialise or melt, but they are not really important. He does his best not to make them banalities, but they are. Their conversation matters more than they do. It bathes them in an importance that they really lack.

The book is about music, touché. On this subject caution melts away, and the author is on homeground. Music saturates the book. The people are drowned in it, even the places against which the tale is told drift away in the current. Why not, really, as he deftly shows? Why not when the current is music, Bach, Beethoven or Mozart?

There is no nonsense about Seth when it comes to music. If the monster masters take you in their vice-like grip, you've had it. Like them, and like the mythical richesse that surrounds them, you've done with ordinary life. Out, away, away, among the shoals and lagoons of the great ocean, beyond life, reason or morality.

It is enormously to his credit that he succeeds with all this. It is because of his sheer cleverness in being able to swim in the crowded waters and banalities of the love tale that pushes unsuccessfully to reach the centre place, because music is there before it. And Seth then lashes out into the truly exciting depths, the aloneness of the demented people who populate musical performance before the public.

There is no way back to anything, home life or knowable objects; the music has got you. This writer is a servant of music, like his creations, and like another such creature was, Walter Legge, the Grand Moghul of EMI Records, husband of another servant, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, all servants like Wagner's Kundry. No price, and there are no rewards but revelation followed by evaporation. An exorbitant price to pay, but worth it. People crowd to music, ready and willing to offer themselves to its powers of fatal attraction. It is one of the incomprehensibles of music. Why willing? The answer is nothing but a form of silence with no riposte possible.

So An Equal Music begins. Seth moves where only regions of quantum physics usually tread, easily, outside the unequal and painful inadequacy of words. The dots and dashes of music have to be wrestled with or the performance flags. You and the thing sink. All the great deeps elude you. Seth is a warrior, another beloved juggernaut from the sub-continent, armed to rough up and revitalise the English language. This language, above all others, is capable of doing the job alone, but it seems inertia withholds the force of freshness. It is left to the Indian phoenixes to continue the cleansing process.

The quartet is special in music; it is a love story for four people -- which is rude, and quartets are never rude, but are suggestive monsters who are never explicit. The orchestra, by comparison, is a herd. But the quartet has never got over the fact that the four-at-a-time was the solace of Beethoven's stone-like silence. Never silent itself, it succeeded with the offerings he gave it, which have exalted music to its highest position.

In this book a quartet called the 'Maggiore' is one of the chief objects. Four people, three men and one woman tightly pressed together, incestuous, each different but joined in the service of the music they perform. They travel constantly from one musical centre to the other, new and old worlds, bound with bonds of Bach and Mozart. Travel bags tightly packed, always ready in the hall of their homes for a quick dash to a plane. Deformed creatures, nothing matters to them but the expertise with which they can ascend the perpendicular precipices of a Bach toccata, all steps safely through the minefields of Brahms at his Chinese algebra. Tormented by the recording studios, like the old cinema days of Hollywood, you are only as good as your last recording. No home life, children in perpetual cold storage. They are people who live on the extreme rim of the possible with nothing but the void confronting them. They are music's archangels.

There isn't really a tale, it is all places and movement. There is a heroine pianist who does not fill the role. She has the gift of music projection at its highest level, but is headed for total deafness. And the descriptions of what it is like to be deaf and play the piano at a public concert, attempting to cope with the entrances and exits of chamber music, is hair raising. Likewise the bits and pieces of a one-time attempt at a fixed relationship between this girl and boy, the hero of the story, whom she meets in Vienna her home city, comes and goes in fractured pieces. The author must be congratulated on achieving these complementaries of the commonplace with great art. The hypotenuse of his triangle has a sharp point and always hits the mark. His fine-grain imagination has the speed and pounce of a mongoose and can be as lethal.

The hero comes from the north of England where all the music comes from -- Rochdale. The description of a train ride past Oldham into Manchester has the authentic wintery odour of soiled metal which overcomes both cities. Rochdale, his birth place, is the special place where the true hero of the equal music comes; this is the Tononi violin. The Tononi dominates the book.

Seth's gift of fixing places is often quite frightening. London is his most adored, understood city. We don't read about it, we hear it: the traffic, the weary look of the Bayswater Road and, above all, the sounds of Bach and Beethoven. 'The Art of the Fugue', about which most of the book deals, haunts the Wigmore Hall, called the Wig in the book, and it, not the page, flames off the paper and the Wig is before us. The hero takes many walks. Bleak, tragic ones, the Serpentine and the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The author seems to love describing the great pool of the heart these places have if you love them as he does. It is not much use reading An Equal Music, he seems to say, if you do not love London and music as he does.

The Maggiore Quartet visits Vienna and Seth gives total magic to the odour of these step-offs on the wandering souls of the musicians. The Musikverein is the scene of one of the Rochdale boys' nervous collapses. Michael crumbles; he runs. The quartet have lost him. But he is not lost. He has his adored Tononi the violin, the voice of Venice where it was made. It is old and valuable, a gift from an elderly lady of Rochdale. He almost loses it in litigation from the family on her death.

But the Tononi has its own life. It becomes the reader's friend. We see it inspected by an expert, put through a sort of Caesarean operation, when it is measured inside the womb with the amber honey of its colour glowing through. The old piece of divine wood is Michael's true love. They are joined together and understand each other's moods for life. The end of the book is weepy. Michael has lost, due to his own nervous jet dives, almost everything -- the Maggiore Quartet, which is a resting place for wounded souls, his former piano playing love, his direction all gone but music.

We have notes, and tears, and the Tononi and the words of Meredith which fit its voice: "He drops the silver chain of sound/Of many links without a break." An Equal Music ends with a short sentence of four lines, the most beautiful words of love that would be written about music. This time the writer is Seth's own voice singing, not the Tononi's. A last minute bonus for the heart.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Me and my fiddle