REVIEW: Music And Silence, by Rose Tremain

Title: Music and Silence
Author: Rose Tremain
Pages: 464
Rating: 4.5/5
Bought/Borrowed/Loaned: Bought 2nd hand from amazon.co.uk

SUMMARY
Music and Silence is many things, encompasses many stories and moments, fleeting, magical, painful moments. But at its centre is Peter Claire, an English lute player who arrives in the court of King Christian IV of Denmark in 1630. The king soon takes a liking to Peter, calling him his "angel" due to Peter's good looks, and asking the Englishman to be his personal aide and help in times of need. Christian is a contradictory man, haunted by the past, pained by his unrequited love for his wife the Queen Kirsten, who is conducting a not-so-discreet adulterous affair. A mirror image of Peter's role the queen has employed a new lady-in-waiting at the time of Peter's arrival in Denmark: Emilia Tilsen, a quiet and compassionate girl, becomes the queen's confidant. Both Peter and Emilia are escaping from their painful pasts and find themselves, almost inevitably, drawn to each other, seeking love and comfort amidts the royal intrigues and the sorrows of a country in ruin.

REVIEW
The biggest strength of Music and Silence is its kaleidoscopic nature. The accumulation of stories, small in scope or important, like grains of sand that together make up the true landscape of this work. The point of view changes and so do the narrative voices, and the non-chronological plot made me enjoy this book so much, in a way that I had not enjoyed Restoration - maybe the voice in that one was too detached, too clever to begin with, and while that fitted the narrator perfectly, I felt it lacked some heart. There's plenty of heart in Music and Silence, and while occassionally sentimentaly shows its ugly head but otherwise Tremain has an admirable command of her material. Many images will stick to the reader's mind: for me it's the teenage King Christian tending to his best friend Bror during his illness, fighting off Death with the power of writing, the power of names, words.

As a historical novel, which what we are interested in now, this is an example of what should be done: a story told in a shamelessly modern style, which illuminates the 17th century through human detail and lyricism, not dead fact. The gorgeous writing, rather than the predictable character or the thin plot, is what grabs us here. A fine example of literary novel in a historical setting and using history for its own purposes, rather than a historical novel that dispatches literary style as useless, which sadly is what happens with almost every labelled historical novel I've met with.