It's rare that a book surprises me these days, but this one did. It's not just the story of a musician--it's told through the eyes of a critic who champions him, who sees his flaws as much as his potential and is not afraid to gloss over the sordid details.

The first delightful surprise was the inclusion of the folk music revival, an anthropological movement when people went out to record old, dying folk songs for posterity. Leslie Shepherd, the critic, first meets Jessold on a trip dedicated to this attempt and their friendship and mutual interest in creating a good English opera--the first since Gilbert and Sullivan--blooms.

It's a clever move on the part of the author to show us a musician's life through a critic's eye--the critic is used to writing for an audience without an advanced education in music, so I was never completely lost in the vocabulary of music.

After the interesting and wholly engaging first half, in which Shepherd recounts the bare facts of his acquaintance with Jessold, tracing the evolution of the composer and eventual murderer, a beautiful second half unfolds. We know from the beginning that we don't get the whole story in the first half, but the second half is, well, unexpectedly romantic (this from someone who considers herself "a cold-hearted crocodile"). Shepherd's devoted, if out-of-the-ordinary relationship with his wife unfolds almost as an afterthought, but their mutual relationship with Jessold adds gorgeous depth to an already nuanced story. As with all love, though, the Shepherds' becomes complicated.

This is, of course, the story of a murderer who has been shown at his most human and vulnerable--it can only be a tragedy. Whose tragedy it is receives direct discussion in the book, but whether the reader will agree with the narrator's conclusion is, I suspect, as much a reflection of the individual reader as the plot.

The only reason I won't put this on my "recommended" shelf is that I think it could take a very particular reader to appreciate it all. An interest in music is a given, no less than in historical nonfiction, but there is also a danger, I think, of misreading...or at least, reading in a very different light from the one I read it in. Usually I would find this delightful, but I suspect that some people would consider the Shepherds' relationship the opposite of romantic, and I'd rather not have that reading act as a bait-and-switch.

Readers with an interest in classical music in general and opera in particular, in England on the eve of World War I, and in the lives of those one would not normally suspect capable of murder will enjoy this book...but it's also a great one to get people who usually like only one of those to come out of their literary shells.

Quote Roundup

Jessold was an atheist, but here he spoke through the unlettered voice of the rural travelling people. He had no faith of his own, but in theirs he was a true believer. (75)

Mustard gas and shells shattered the calm of imperial verse. No one had read war poetry like it. Heroism, valour, the sweet wine of youth': gone. (119)

I hadn't liked the work in 1912. I liked it even less now, so perfectly did it suit the forced smile, the self-conscious frivolity of the post-war hour. (133)

I felt myself Dickensian: not one of his characters but the author himself, creator of plots, puppet-master. (136)

"As a critic, it is your job simply to tell people whether they will be entertained. The public must not be short-changed with mediocrity because a company is counting its pennies." (202)

If [Walmsley] knew anything, he knew how to sell a newspaper. He could hold a mirror to the world better than anybody alive, reinforce public prejudice, the nmake the man on the street pay for the privilege of reading an opinion he already held. He could also make that many pay for having his opinions formed on his behalf. (205)

It is one of the singular joys of our century that our great contemporary composers, having reached Schoenberg's precipice [of atonalism], did not leap. Merely because he had thrown himself into the abyss did not mean that it was good or right or necessary, or that others had to follow suit. Nor did they. The greatest of their works harnessed the power of that unbounded force released by Arnold Shoenberg: Berg's Wozzeck and Jessold's Little Musgrave spring to mind. Both prove that atonalism, used with restraint, can give us the most passionate and expressive of music. At the time, I was too intimidated, to occupied, too circumspect to allow such a possibility. It became clear as time passed, and I came to understand each of those operas as pure emotion, an exposed nerve. Great art requires perspective. (251)

I had resigned myself, in marriage, to love and honour, but Miriam's reticence with regard to the certain aspects of the first half of my vow merely made the other half more attractive. I had always hoped that a good marriage should rather require warmth and friendship than romantic passion to sustain it, and I had been long been suspicious of the intensity of the latter. (301)

Surely there are very few husbands who do not experience a frisson of pleasure when their wife is admired by another man. I had many times delighted in the position, reading the minute clues that emanated from her, the privileged information unknowable to anyone else. (304)

I had not, during our marriage, been anxiously awaiting such an alignment, but I had assumed it inevitable. Miriam and I did not share the same lack of vitality. She required an unconditional love from me that I was happy, so happy, to give. I had taken it for granted that, with another individual, with my acquiescence and approval, she might feel free to explore shared interests quite distinct from my own. I had not dreamed that, in this eventuality, our intentions should be so perfectly in harmony. (306)

I had thought it so tedious for Jessold to be at the mercy of a muse; but how much worse to be a muse at the mercy of an erratic imagination; and how much worse still to have been a muse wrung entirely dry of inspiration. (352)

It is not by the kindness of the creator that we judge the greatness of art. (383)
( )

Overripe with puns and allusions, Stace succeeds in this awkwardly titled gem. Thanks to a cold, I read the novel in a pair of horizontal sweeps. This has certainly heightened my desire for Stace's Misfortune. ( )

I finished this book last night and I'm not sure yet how I felt about it. It definitely needs a little description first. The book is set in the classical musical world in England in the early 1900s. The main characters are Charles Jessold, a young composer, and Leslie Shepard, a music critic. These two are closely entwined, I'm not sure friends is the right word, though. The book is told completely from Shepard's point of view and he is not a reliable narrator, at least in the first half. He's also very pretentious and annoying and I basically hated the first half of the book. What happens is (and you find this out presented as a newspaper article on the first pages, so it isn't really a spoiler) Jessold murders his wife and her lover and then kills himself. The first half of the book is Shepard's telling of the events leading up to this for the police. The second half of the book is another retelling of the events written at the end of Shepard's life, but this time you find out that most of the first half of the book was lies.

I realized while reading the second half why I hated the narrator and book so much at the beginning - because he's lying and leaving out info to lead the police astray. But it's kind of hard to like a book when a whole half of it is so obnoxious. It's definitely growing on me the farther away from it I get, but I'm not sure I'd put it high on a recommendation list. One thing that I appreciated was that the writing about music and description of professional musicians was right on. I am a professional musician and I usually stay away from fictional books with musicians as character because I find them so far off from accurate. So that was definitely good. ( )

It is utterly unreasonable that Wesley Stace should have been granted such talent. What can't the man do?



This book has everything: music, WWI history, romance and antiromance, heroes and antiheroes, moments of piercing beauty and moments of neck-whipping chaos, and structural complexity worth social as well as academic discussion. The ending has a whopper of a twist beating even the multiple twists that precede it (no mean feat), the critics and self-critics snark across a spectrum from little gems of snideness to brutally accurate digs, the scenery - physical and social - is evoked sparely but certainly. In other words, the people who liked Cloud Atlas before it was being filmed (back when its structural complexity was for the nerds), people who like WWI-era stories about the home front in Britain, anyone with even the vaguest hint of appreciation for the efforts of early ethnomusicology, and people who like city English humor won't fail to love this.



Especially if you get a copy of John Wesley Harding's Trad Arr Jones and listen to the recording of "Little Musgrave," then also listen to something harshly atonal and contemporary (Middle period Schoenberg is among the suggestions the narrator of the novel offers). A knowledge of operatic structure won't hurt. But you don't have to. I'm just saying that Harding, a/k/a Wesley Stace, did a knockdown version of the ballad, and thinking about how the narration reflects early 20th century antiheroic opera, with its slow dissolution of both direction and mind of each character, makes the reading even more entertaining. ( )

I loved this book. Don’t read too many of the reviews, I think too many of them give too much away, as usual, and in this case I think it’s important to let the story unfold naturally.

This is the only thing I’ve read by Stace, AKA John Wesley Harding, and I was pleasantly surprised. He turns out to be an excellent writer, and not just "good for a musician". There are several allusions on the back cover to the "musical" writing, and I thought that was just critic talk, but I have to say it’s true; the themes that keep repeating, weaving in and out, changing slightly every time really did feel like music and worked great with the story. This is stories within stories within stories that come back in unexpected ways and take on new meaning.

This is about a composer of 100 years ago, narrated by his friend and partner, and written mostly in the style of a book from that time. He does an excellent job with this, it doesn’t have that fake old-timey feel that plagues some authors. I might have believed this was a 100 year old book, everything rings true and authentic, but it does have some nice modern touches.

It’s about music, Edwardian England and the changes that were happening, stories and the reliability of them, relationships (friends, marriage, trust), the creative process and murder. It’s not an action story. ( )