As he walked away, grimly happy with himself, he swung the chain of Persian bells, still hanging from the hinges and the latch, and listened to the melody that no one wrote, the song that had no words, the water that was waiting for its stone.
Having only read Harvest by Jim Crace before (and loving that book, so I should have thought of picking him up again before now), I don't have a wide basis for considering him as an author overall. I can only note that The Melody shares many characteristics with that earlier Man Booker shortlisted, International DUBLIN Literary Award winning read (an allegory out of time, focussed on social justice issues, gorgeous line-by-line writing), and while I was just as thoroughly immersed in the story this time as last, I ended Melody thinking that it wasn't nearly as impactful or successful as Harvest. Still, if my only complaint is that Crace didn't live up to the standards of his own previous work, this book can still be pegged a notch above the ordinary.
Death does not tidy up or sweep as it departs. We all of us leave traces other than the ashes and the bones.As the book opens, we meet Alfred Mr. Al Busi – a recently widowered man in his sixties, locally famous as a crooner and songwriter, rambling around the large seaside villa he was born in – and we soon learn of his loneliness and grief. There's nothing specific about the timeframe (perhaps the 1920s – Busi dials a candlestick phone, and while there are cars, he travelled by horse and wagon as a child) and nothing specific about the setting (perhaps somewhere on the Mediterranean, but there are no geographic clues in the various characters' names), and this nonspecificity allows the story to be universal and seemingly allegorical; Busi is everyman and his fate is ours. When Busi is attacked in his kitchen late one night (By an animal? A vagrant? A wild child?), events are put in motion that will see not only the poor and homeless driven out of town, but Busi's own family home put under threat in the names of progress and development. Crace's writing kept me intrigued the entire time, as with the details of the midnight attack:
At the moment that it fled the riches of his larder and came for him, Busi could not say exactly what it was. Something fierce and dangerous, for sure, something that must have slipped inside the house in the moment when he was setting right the disorder in the yard. But its species? No idea. And male or female? Well, the smell was hardly womanly. The smell could not belong to any bed or any wife. It was neither sweet nor savory. No, it was pungent, lavatorial at first, and then much flatter. Not a bad smell, actually. Not excrement. Not sweat. More a mix of earth and mold and starch. Potato peel. The creature's skin would feel as smooth, as damp, as lightly pelted as potato peel. Naked too. Naked as potato peel.And I found several passages bizarrely funny, as with the tabloid journalist who worked himself into a frenzy exaggerating facts and misquoting sources in his writeup of the attack:
Soubriquet settled at his desk and wrote his four-voweled “Unrest” article at speed. For reasons that were awkward to explain and not easy to suppress, he found the process stimulating. Sexually, that is. This was nearly always how his deadlines were achieved. Impulse, effort, and reward.There are a lot of lovely bits about ageing and loss and loneliness – it seems Busi's only, sort of, friend is his dead wife's sister; an elegant widow who is lamenting her own declining powers of attraction – and just as Busi's sentimental songs have gone out of fashion, progress (in the form of Busi's nephew and presumptive heir) seems to demand that the streets be cleared of homeless vagrants, the forested “bosk” be cleared of wild animals, that Busi's own home be cleared to make way for condos. This storyline about rapaciously subduing the wildness and razing the past might be a little heavy handed, but it's not unrelated to where we find ourselves today environmentally or socially. The complaint I have about The Melody is the narrative structure: For most of the book, there is a third-person narrator who speaks directly to the reader every now and then, explaining that he knows what Busi's every move and thought were because they eventually had many in-depth conversations about the singer's life (yet how he knew about, say, the journalist's private life is never explained). And then late in the book, the story shifts to this narrator's own point-of-view, and other than dividing the story into a sort of lonely before and an after in which Busi has made a couple of new friends, I found the whole structure a bit pointless; why bother? Hard to say, but beyond my small complaints (including the superiority of Harvest by comparison), I was captivated by this read, and most especially by the details in Crace's writing:
We leave him sitting in his drawing room, the midnight widower. He has the wide stool to himself. He sits there looking at the sea and stars until his head drops with exhaustion and his chin is rested on his chest. He's in between the dusk and dawn, between the future and the past. He can either fall asleep and dream, or he can stay awake and dream, all day, all night. That's what we're free to do. We are. We are. We are the animals that dream.
