Kirsty Gunn, The Big Music, Faber and Faber, 2012.
www.kirsty-gunn.com/
The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him.
In this remarkable work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as magical as a dream. One emerges at the end of it altered and changed. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.
“More than a dappled tale, an allegory, or history, The Big Music is a landscape; a work of longing fragments that collect on a journey and grow to light lands before, around, and after them. It’s a hike that makes us feel not so much Scotland as Scottish, and whose flavours, like the title’s theme, cannot be made small. Haunting and spacious.” - dbc Pierre
“I emerged from The Big Music blown away by the pulse and force of such fearless writing. It is beautiful, powerful work. Gunn has written to a rhythm and not to a plot – as Virginia Woolf urges – and she has written a landscape I didn’t want to leave. Gunn terrain! How deeply I love this book, a magnificent tour de force.” - Jane Goldman
“Why is it that in the English-speaking world it is nearly always women writers – Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Muriel Spark, Rosalind Belben, and now Kirsty Gunn – who understand, as composers have always understood, that we human beings are not solitary individuals facing the world but form part of a larger music, which may be intuited but can never be fully grasped?
A narrative which caught this would remind us more of the Norse Sagas and William Faulkner than of Jane Austen and Anthony Powell. Kirsty Gunn’s remarkable novel, which seeks to give voice to the bleak loneliness of the Scottish Highlands by forging a very precise narrative equivalent of the highest form of traditional bagpipe music, does just that. It is a remarkable achievement.” - Gabriel Josipovici
The opening lines of incantatory prose in The Big Music evoke the austere beauty of the northern reaches of the Scottish Highlands, its vast landscape of hills and moorland and the seemingly endless, silent space stretching out beneath an ever-changing sky. We are made to feel a sense of human non-belonging in this stark environment, an understanding of oneself as fundamentally alien no matter how familiar the land might be or become, even after a lifetime. Then comes another level of distancing, as the author wonders aloud how best to begin: with “a few words and the scrap of a tune put down for the back of the book in some attempt to catch the opening of the thing, how it might start.” Before long, scholarly-sounding footnotes appear that elucidate the meaning of various Gaelic terms and refer the reader to a set of appendices at the back of the book that contain maps, musical scores, transcripts from radio interviews, bibliographies, and various other documents pertaining to the history and structure of a type of music that explicate its complexity and gradually reveal its austere beauty. The reader soon understands that this is no ordinary novel: the aesthetic project at the heart of Kirsty Gunn’s recent work aims to recreate one form of art out of another, to develop a prose that mirrors the compositional form of the piobaireachd (pronounced pee-brohh), the Gaelic name for the classical bagpipe music of the Scottish Highlands.
The basic conceit of the book is to present itself as a compendium of found papers only partially converted into narrative form. Journal entries, files, transcribed dialogues, fragments of stories, and accounts of a family’s domestic history comprise the material from which The Big Music has been distilled—or so we are told. Fact and fiction blur as non-existent mountains are added to existing landscapes, family lineages are invented, academic research is simulated or actually conducted, and permanent archives are established in universities to conjure a world that might have been. We learn about a family that held fast to a swath of land during the great Scottish Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries that drove untold thousands of poor rural Scots to the coastal areas and the Lowlands and abroad to Nova Scotia, that exercised foresight and prudence in managing their business affairs while at the same time upholding a musical tradition throughout seven generations, and that produced a lineage of men who were unable to express or even to know their own feelings—except, that is, in music.
Gunn takes this real and invented history and weaves a nuanced tale of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters that is patterned after the piobaireachd or Coel Mor, literally the “Big Music” of the classical Scottish bagpipe tradition, which consists of the following movements: the Urlar or opening movement, literally the ground laid as the basic musical theme; the Taorluath, which develops the theme’s complexity and is either identical with or includes the Leumlath or “Stag’s Leap,” a daring departure from the theme and a metaphor for creativity; the Crunluath or “Crowning,” a play of embellishments on the theme; and the Crunluath A Mach, the “Showing of the Crown” and a display of the piper’s virtuosity. The piece ends with a return to the opening theme of the Urlar. It is a musical form with a pentatonic scale, played exclusively on the great Highland bagpipe; it produces a timeless, haunting sound that seems to rise up from the landscape itself. And as the essential story of The Big Music emerges, meanders around itself, and gradually intertwines with new narrative strands, it is precisely this sound that Gunn seeks to recreate in her own spare and haunting prose.
Old John Callum MacKay Sutherland, sixth in a line of pipers, nearing the end of his life, takes a baby from its cradle and makes for the hills early one morning in an effort to finish a musical composition he has only conceived in part. His plan is to take her along the sligheach or secret way to a hut he’s built in a hidden part of the hills for the purpose of working in peace. His composition is called “Lament for Himself”; it is The Big Music of his life, and he needs the child to complete it, for new life to carry on after he has gone. In the old man’s musical imagination, schooled on the Coel Mor tradition, each note clearly stands for a person or event and embodies a kind of principle that interacts with the other notes of the composition. As he makes his way up the hill with the baby in his arms, the music he’s written begins to merge with his gait, his breath, with every thought he thinks and every move he makes.
John’s own note is the high “A,” which returns to itself again and again in keeping with his lifelong emotional isolation; gradually, a high “E,” the “echoing” note on the bagpipe scale, develops into a gentle theme for the baby, a kind of lullaby. Everything seems to be falling into place, when all at once the voice of the mother intrudes and a high “G” dropping to a low “G” awakens him to the horror of abducting an infant in its “crazy reach of notes, in that awful space between them.” It is only when he perceives himself through the lens of his own composition that John understands the ramifications of what he is doing—although the notes themselves have been written weeks before the actual deed. In other words, the music evinces what can only be called a prophetic quality as John gradually comes to grasp the meaning of what his composition is communicating to him from the depths of his own being.
Gunn’s aesthetic project reminds us that every art is essentially a translation from something inchoate within the artist’s consciousness into a form that can communicate content to others. And one of the book’s themes is the price this devotion exacts from the artist’s closest relationships. But there is another implication, resonating as it were between the lines. The origins of Coel Mor, classical bagpipe music, reach back into a largely unknown history throughout which the oral mnemonic teaching method of canntaireachd, the singing of the composition to commit it to memory, was considered a more accurate and enduring form of musical “notation” than a written score. This suggests that the laments, summonings, and salutes of this highly formalized musical tradition, in which the slightest variation or embellishment transports precise meaning, might have constituted its own language for recording history; might, like the poetry of the bards, have once been a vehicle for passing down tales of genealogy and clan lore. Indeed, writers, among them Proust, have frequently pondered the idea that music, somewhere in its ancient origins, could once have been a medium for a more direct form of communication among humans and for recording information in a manner that was somehow fundamentally truer than spoken or written language—in other words, that at some stage of our prehistory, the development of speech and the evolution of music were parallel endeavors with an open outcome.
Piobaireachd is the tradition that has defined and bound the Sutherland family for seven generations. It is also what has driven the pipers, all of them men, apart. Fathers absorbed in their music, largely inaccessible to their sons and passing both their remoteness and their talent down to them; mothers running entire households, giving whatever they can of themselves to offset the emotional loss. At the core of a great musical legacy that has prevailed against considerable odds is a sense of failed lives, of loneliness. John Sutherland’s Lament is not only for an old man about to leave this life, but also for everything he’s let slip past him. The opening bars of the Urlar or first movement are the “resigned inhalation and exhalation of a single man, lying in the dark and awaiting, at the end of his life, his death.” Again and again, he returns to the “Piper’s note,” the “A,” as “the sound of someone who’s not been able to remove himself from his own mind to see the ways and needs of others, for one minute, not for one minute.” Yet despite this, the high “G”—the note of sorrow—is always followed by the note of love, the “F.” Although he never fully realizes it, when John Sutherland returns to the place he was born, he is drawn back not by a house or a landscape, but by the only woman he has ever loved—the woman he should have made his wife—and by a daughter and granddaughter he never knew were his.
In The Big Music, the character that finally emerges as the narrator is the daughter, Helen MacKay. While Helen, herself a writer and scholar, is not necessarily the author’s alter ego, it’s clear that Gunn, in the meta-narrative emerging from the book’s appendices, uses Helen’s literary endeavors to provide essential information concerning the multiple levels on which The Big Music can be considered. One level is indicated by Helen’s (and Gunn’s) professed interest in literary modernism. Form and content converge in the modernist work; Gunn quotes T.S. Eliot in his foreword to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, which describes the modernist novel as “another kind of fiction that is nothing like a conventional story (…) but, like a poem, can be intricately and fully ‘written.’” When a human being becomes a fixed coordinate more real than a stretch of deeply familiar land or a family estate one was born on, the idea of location or place becomes elusive, more a quality or a state of being than a definition. And indeed, Gunn presents the narrative itself as a place, that is, as a space to inhabit rather than a representation that requires an outside reality to verify it.
Helen holds a doctorate in literature. There is mention of scholarly papers she is planning or has already written on the subject of women’s narratives, e.g., “The Metaphor of Lullaby” in Studies in the Maternal, or “The Lullaby as a Feminist Metaphor in Highland Literature.” Thus, in addition to her project of reviving the modernist novel, Gunn has woven a discreet subtext into her narrative as Helen investigates the feminist theoretical writing that has arisen around Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, two writers she (like Gunn) has a special affinity for. For even as the story of the male artist and heir to a centuries-old tradition is underpinned by the story of his illegitimate (and unacknowledged) daughter whose academic career is curtailed when she returns home to bring up her child, Helen succeeds in drawing the map of her magnum opus as she weaves her father’s incomplete creative vision into her own. In other words, concealed within the narrative of the male genius is a far subtler study of the female artist and creative genius whose achievement is generally overlooked or ignored. It is on this level that Gunn asks how gender studies can provide a context for a deeper comprehension of the female role in literature and to rethink prevailing notions of the feminine and the creative. At the same time, to understand the coordinates of a woman like Helen’s mother, the housekeeper Margaret—all of whose life seems to have been given over to domestic servitude—is to reexamine and reconsider the invisibility of women and motherhood throughout history. As she contemplates her own life and the lives of her mother and grandmother, all of them bound together by an unspoken tradition of resisting the female role as it is generally defined and raising their children without a husband, she sees a larger narrative at work that spans generations. “The history of women in these places is always a quiet story, it’s quietly told,” Helen writes.
What strength is. And love. To be strong . . . but with an understanding, too, of that which is tentative and can be frail. Therefore to treasure love and return to it, going back and back again to that invisible thing, even when it has no currency in the world, when some may say it has given you nothing, says Margaret’s story in the end, return, to find the richness there.It is the music underlying everything we do, the blood that flows through the arteries of our soul, the force that fuels the creative impulse, the singular thing that lends meaning to our lives. - - quarterlyconversation.com/a-few-words-and-the-scrap-of-a-tune-on-kirsty-gunns-the-big-music
You don’t have to really, really like bagpipe music to enjoy or appreciate this novel; but it might help. Like some Renaissance rebus, it is, or purports to be, that which it describes: it’s organised and paced in accordance with the eponymous tradition of “Big Music”, or piobaireachd, in the Scottish Highlands – a tradition which is not on any account to be confused with the Little Music, eightsome reels and the Flowers of the Forest and all that.
It’s also a fairly classic piece of B S Johnson-style modernism, a bricolage of found texts, a dodgy dossier of narrative and contextual material, told in several different voices, set down in a studiedly erratic way, with footnotes, appendices, sheet music and little drawings.
It accumulates into a fractured family fable (the adjective applies to both nouns) recounting a series of events in an old, grey house in Sutherland, long used as a pipers’ academy.
These events reach a crescendo right at the start, as the elderly John Sutherland flees the house, having abducted the baby granddaughter of the housekeeper, his sometime lover, Margaret.
The plan seems to be that some sort of intersection between the potent human littleness of the baby and the vast sublimity of the Highland landscape will trigger a creative response whereby John will not so much be inspired to compose his final magnum opus as simply transcribe it from some immanent manifestation, a curdling or quickening into song of the wind as it slices through the heather, or something similar. But, of course, it’s not long before he is found, up on the hillside, in his little bothy, relieved of the still-warm infant and placed back on his medication.
The rest of the book is largely dedicated to answering at least some of the questions posed by this scene (the ùrlar, or theme, of the piece, in Gunn’s conceit): family ties, filial discord, remembered passion – and a fair amount of bagpiping.
The rest of the book is largely dedicated to answering at least some of the questions posed by this scene (the ùrlar, or theme, of the piece, in Gunn’s conceit): family ties, filial discord, remembered passion – and a fair amount of bagpiping.
There is some lessening of the pace after an opening section that is energetic and evocative, and which makes an effort to rework all the tourist board clichés about the vast sublimity of the landscape in a fresh way. But it’s informative (much of the “documentary” material in the book would appear to be factual), and it’s all characterised by Gunn’s distinctive prose, cosseting and elaborate, and fully fit to be itself termed “musical”.
Walter Pater famously said that all art aspired to the condition of music – though it is unlikely he had bagpipes specifically in mind. Be that as it may, it’s a proclamation which resonated strongly with 20th-century abstract artists of the clan Kandinsky; it has occasionally been taken up as a challenge by writers.
However, while music is a useful metaphorical framework if you’re approaching, say, Finnegans Wake, I’m not sure it’s particularly germane to the works of Balzac or George Eliot. The novel does what music can’t: it tells you things. It also happens to you intimately, inside your head, at a place and time of your choosing; you enjoy certain freedoms that are not extended to consumers of other art forms.
There is something blustering about The Big Music, a bullying undercurrent to its insistence on the power of place. And there is something strange about so elaborate and distancing a methodology being set to work on a project which feels a little like being wrapped in an enforced embrace: the cerebral, experimental half and the flubbery, sentimental half of the book just don’t quite gel.
Plus it’s not only bagpipes you need a high tolerance for to get through the book without reaching for the Lagavulin (though you could always imagine Auld John is playing a dulcimer, a saxophone or a 1959 Fender Telecaster – that’s one of the freedoms enjoyed by the novel-reader). It’s the whole romantic nationalism thing.
Gunn, a New Zealander, may perhaps be forgiven for being seduced by the Highlands, and for seeing some essentialist relationship between that particular landscape, a particular tribe of people and a particular culture. She also points out that she received some support from Creative Scotland, the country’s equivalent of the Arts Council, during the book’s long gestation, so another Trainspotting was never on the cards. But substitute (say) “Kent”, “Morris dancing” and “white working-class Englishmen”, and you’re suddenly looking at something a lot less cuddly. - Keith Miller
Walter Pater famously said that all art aspired to the condition of music – though it is unlikely he had bagpipes specifically in mind. Be that as it may, it’s a proclamation which resonated strongly with 20th-century abstract artists of the clan Kandinsky; it has occasionally been taken up as a challenge by writers.
However, while music is a useful metaphorical framework if you’re approaching, say, Finnegans Wake, I’m not sure it’s particularly germane to the works of Balzac or George Eliot. The novel does what music can’t: it tells you things. It also happens to you intimately, inside your head, at a place and time of your choosing; you enjoy certain freedoms that are not extended to consumers of other art forms.
There is something blustering about The Big Music, a bullying undercurrent to its insistence on the power of place. And there is something strange about so elaborate and distancing a methodology being set to work on a project which feels a little like being wrapped in an enforced embrace: the cerebral, experimental half and the flubbery, sentimental half of the book just don’t quite gel.
Plus it’s not only bagpipes you need a high tolerance for to get through the book without reaching for the Lagavulin (though you could always imagine Auld John is playing a dulcimer, a saxophone or a 1959 Fender Telecaster – that’s one of the freedoms enjoyed by the novel-reader). It’s the whole romantic nationalism thing.
Gunn, a New Zealander, may perhaps be forgiven for being seduced by the Highlands, and for seeing some essentialist relationship between that particular landscape, a particular tribe of people and a particular culture. She also points out that she received some support from Creative Scotland, the country’s equivalent of the Arts Council, during the book’s long gestation, so another Trainspotting was never on the cards. But substitute (say) “Kent”, “Morris dancing” and “white working-class Englishmen”, and you’re suddenly looking at something a lot less cuddly. - Keith Miller
Novels that aspire to the condition of pure music, where the sound of the words gains ground on meaning, have fallen out of fashion since the prewar heyday of modernism and its culmination in Finnegans Wake. This is partly to do with modernism's difficulty. Writers such as Joyce or Woolf were concerned not only with the musical patterning of syllables, but with structure: they used counterpoint, repetition, circularity, simultaneity and so on in much the same way as a composer might. This was felt, ironically, to be a closer reflection of life itself, for straightforward stories are a distortion – or at least a heavy re-editing – of subjective experience. Conservative with our own personal stories, we repeat them in endless loop tapes with only minimal variation, yet this is rarely reflected in literature. The pleasure we take in strong and suspenseful narrative precludes it.
This makes the appearance of Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music all the more remarkable, even given the reputation of its prize-garnering author. Virginia Woolf's most experimental book, The Waves, was partly influenced by Beethoven's quartets; Gunn's is not just influenced by Scottish bagpipe music, it seeks to inhabit it. The haunting solemnity of the piobaireachd (pronounced "pe-brohh") or céol mòr (the "big music" of the title, being "the classical compositional form of the Highland bagpipe") is so vividly present in every phrase that we seem to hear the "low drone" as well as the "pipes in tune together like a rhyme".
Structurally, the book respects céol mòr's division into four movements, beginning with a section called "Urlar" (the "ground"), which establishes the main theme and musical ideas for all that follows. In Gunn's interpretation, ùrlar is also the remote and beautiful landscape of Sutherland, the northernmost area of the Highlands – isolation is the central theme of the novel. Thus people and landscape are both inseparable and mutually alien.
The novel's beginning is sonorously magical: "The hills only come back the same: I don't mind, and all the flat moorland and the sky. I don't mind, they say, and the water says it too …" This is a romantic personification that cleverly cancels itself out. The novel does likewise with its own fictionality: defined as a heap of "selected papers", initially gathered by one of the main characters, it has hundreds of footnotes, some of them genuine. Along with the appendices and an "archive" of materials at the University of Dundee (an ongoing installation by her artist sister Merran Gunn), these blur the fictional boundaries and disrupt the main melody with a suitably flat fastidiousness.
The novel's opening sequence is suspenseful enough: an old man stumbles towards a secret Highland hut with a tiny baby in his arms. John Sutherland, the dying son of a famous piper, is intent on composing a piobaireachd called "Lament for Himself"; this complex summary of his life has to contain a lullaby. As individual notes stand for people and themes in the novel, so the baby is needed for the embedded tune. We move in and out of John Sutherland's rambling thoughts as he clutches the snatched baby like a piper's bag in a vividly realised sequence that will haunt the rest of the book.
Male and female, motherhood and fatherhood, are interwoven in The Big Music through the thread of love and its absence. Few women pipe: the big-lung loudness of Scottish bagpipes made them suitable not just for the great Highland spaces but also for battle – the English regarded them as weapons during the period of the Clearances. This warrior association is challenged and undermined in the novel by the presence of the baby, its mother Helen, its grandmother Margaret and other more distant female figures. Margaret looks after the Grey House, "itself an interval between notes, a curious reach, a space of sound", where John was brought up amid the rigours of his renowned father's piping school, begrudging "its endless isolation and its music that went on and on". Despite standing as the "note of confirmation … in the 'Lament'", Margaret was also estranged from her family by marrying a Highlander called Iain whose grumpy, down-to-earth voice provides a key counterpoint in the book.
The actions of the children and the parents echo each other as do the notes of the piobaireachd, and time devolves its tyranny to space rather than chronology, mainly through the temporal dissolutions of memory. The staggeringly beautiful mountains and the stone-grey house are our only settings, and we begin to know them intimately, despite a lack of sensual detail. Thus the book is about the meaning of home as much as it is about loneliness: where do any of us belong?
The young John, weary of being tanned with a paternal flex for missing his notes, had fled his home; returning in middle age for his ailing mother, he ended up "playing his father's big music … again and again … There need be nothing else." Similarly, his own shocking action with Helen's baby demands the return of his estranged son, Callum, from England in a modulated repetition that is typical of the book's method. The landscape also grips Callum as the long road brings him to the mountains of the north, to that "sense of something torn open to show the day in it".
And as John was always in love with Margaret, so Callum is still in love with Helen, endlessly (and somewhat irritatingly) repeating her name. The darker consequences of all this are subtly touched on, like a deep drone, so that the disturbing incestuous drama is left latent. Neither are the love stories themselves fleshed out: rather, as a footnote puts it, the female presences bring together "in different patternings the notes of love, lament and return".
There is much in this novel about art and the obsessional making of it, most particularly about "the unique intervals" in piobaireachd which are defined as "the gap between worlds inhabited by the artist rather than the individual. The usual rules no longer apply there." The Big Music, its charms as subtle as a piper's grace notes, brilliantly fulfils its own definition. - Adam Thorpe
Kirsty Gunn has set herself a fearsome task. Writing about music, which lies at the heart of this "novel" (the quote marks are hers), is so difficult that almost everyone who tries, fails. And hers is a music which many find inaccessible, and some have never even heard of: the piobaireachd, the formal music of the Highland bagpipes. To take that, and to show us at its heart a love-song and a lullaby: she is a brave woman even to try.
IN HER foreword to The Big Music, Kirsty Gunn whets readers’ appetites with a reference to modernism in literature, “and to its glorious implications upon the construction of written texts”.
She cites T S Eliot’s introduction to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood in which “he informs the reader of the importance of meeting the challenges of another kind of fiction that is nothing like a conventional story, to understand that the novel need not be just a simple form of communication from and about the real world but, like a poem, can be intricately and fully ‘written.’ ” So, is the intricately written The Big Music a novel at all?
Booker prize winner D B C Pierre has called it “a landscape... haunting and spacious.” “Like nothing else I’ve read,” comments Adam Mars Jones, both Faber authors, providing pre-publication flourishes for the book. Mars Jones’s guarded ambiguity may be a caution, or simply the sound of dumbfounded awe. When Gunn refers to her book as a “novel” she awards it inverted commas.
As it turns out, The Big Music is both challenging and conventional, a “novel” which will satisfy those who love poetry and narrative prose alike; it is often lyrical, sometimes flinty, soft as a bog, or as potently smouldering as a peat fire, smoking, secretive, intriguing. Much of it is devoted to history and to the mystical landscape of Sutherland, expressed in the language of nature and music, redolent too of human tragedy and resistance – and of transcendence, expressed through the making of the singular soaring music of the Highland bagpipe, an enticement even to those who – like the novel’s most richly realised character, John Callum MacKay Sutherland of the Grey House – come to reject it, but who are drawn to it eventually as their birthright, their one true art.
Johnnie Sutherland, born in 1923, is, at 83 when the book begins, the latest (and last?) of his family’s line of composers and pipers, each of them masters of that most rigorous form of pipe music known as piobaireachd, or Ceol Mor (the “big music”). Johnnie is dying, mocking mortality, climbing his hill at the crack of dawn, crooking a baby at his elbow as he rises, bent on completing his last hurrah – the Lament for Himself – with the stolen child his inspiration while, in the Grey House, the stirring occupants – housekeeper Margaret, her husband Iain and Helen, her daughter, the baby’s mother, discover the absence, the old boy absconded, on the trail to his secret bothy, there to transcribe melodious dream tunes into notation. Below him the skirl of the chase begins.
For 23 pages the writing is charmed, written in breath, a sustained mellifluous beautifully cadenced stream of prose that appears to hover above the scene as Johnnie flees, pursuing his destiny. Gunn inhabits him, intuits his panicked excitement, his guilt, (hearing voices of accusation: “You took her away”), his isolation. This “first movement”, as Gunn describes it, mirrors the opening refrains of a piobaireachd as it ribbons through clear air. It is rare to read anything so riveting.
What follows is both epic in ambition, and less intensively sustained. Gunn delineates the essentials of Highland musical bagpipe tradition, exploring the nuances of place and its effects, in what she refers to as “a narrative made up of journal entries, papers and inserted sections of domestic history” that are more than compilation and less (and more) than something made up – a phrase replete with double meaning.
In a book with more themes than characters – tackling duty, emigration and return, home, belonging, the process of making a work of art, and the price to be paid for that devotion in relationships – not least those of fathers and sons – it is sometimes uncertain what is “made up” and what is fact.
Old Johnnie’s story stares into the past: his blighted relationship with his father, his leaving home, the passionate love affair with Margaret. His life, more complicated than most in its tangled messiness, lures Callum, his child by marriage, to come from London to the Grey House to tend his father’s dying days, which re-opens Callum’s teenage tryst with scholarly Helen and darkens the novel’s sense of legacy and secrets – a revelation of hidden places in landscape and memory.
The book is structured in piobaireachd form in four movements, its narrative core (which divides into monologue and dialogue in places) interrupted by disquisitions on composition, location and themes, with inserted comments and copious footnotes throughout the text and amplifications of meaning or sources.
All of this makes it sound like a fruitless pursuit for the lover of stories, or an insomniac’s answer to prayer. It is neither. Instead it captivates and illuminates. Take it slowly. Some of its characters lack development, in a way which makes you want more of them, not less. Perhaps Callum’s story is in the offing? - www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/books/book-review-the-big-music-kirsty-gunn-1-2385997
Ah, the bagpipes: played well, capable of making the heart of even the most deracinated Scot surge with joy; played badly, of making us long to hear instead the soothing sounds of foxes copulating. Music composed for and played on the pipes is known as piobaireachd, and can take the form either of a “little music” for celebrations and dances, or Ceol Mor, which translates rather wonderfully from the Scots Gaelic as “the big music” – a music for laments and sorrowful times. Comprising repeated themes that are returned to and elaborated over and over, differently each time, before simply “fading away” whenever the piper chooses to end his tune, it’s a structurally novel form, and one that Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music utilises as the structure for a novel.
Or is it a novel? In a preamble which has all the hallmarks of the favourite 19th-century trick of introducing a controversial text via an “editor” to whom the manuscript is supposed to have been passed (James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a suitably Scots example), Gunn herself sets out what will follow: a trove of apparently “real” notes, diary entries, transcripts and even little bits of play-script she has discovered during her researches, all concerning the (also apparently real) Mackay family of Sutherland, in the Highlands of Scotland. Her role, she claims, has been to assemble the heap of notes she’s found into a narrative, around the structure of the piobaireachd. There’s a nice pun here on “arrangement” in a musical as well as an editorial sense, but that’s small consolation when the preamble feigns humility (“my poor attempts at drawing together a text”) shortly after describing what will follow as “[a] millefeuille of pages … Not so much a story as a place, a world”.
So, hackles raised, we turn the page. We read the outline of how a piece of the Big Music would be structured, in movements and refrains and, therefore, how The Big Music will be. We turn another, and there we see it: our first footnote.
Footnotes in a contemporary text are an easy signifier that we’re in the realm of playful, even – whisper it – postmodern fiction: think David Foster Wallace’s “under the line” commentaries, or the playful, recursive fiction(s) of Junot Diaz, John Barth or Mark Z. Danielewski. In these examples, notes skip alongside the main text, commenting on it, amending and addending it, even undermining it wholly by drawing the main story into the apparent margins – all the while reminding us of postmodernism’s assertions about the impossibility of objective truth.
In The Big Music, footnotes serve a different function: they irritate. The main text of the book – I’ll get on to the appendices shortly – runs to 377 pages, and includes more than 200 footnotes. Most of these draw attention to the structure of the book (“More on this can be found in the preceding Taorluath section” – yes, I know, I’ve just read it). Others simply repeat prior information: on p.115, the four movements of piobaireachd music are summarised, for maybe the fourth or fifth time (and by no means the last). On p.272, a footnote reminds us “The relevance of [the Little Hut, John Sutherland’s hideaway, as a] place of composition has already been noted in earlier sections”. The “arrangement” of texts within The Big Music may be intended to look contingent, potentially moveable, like the chapters of that Modernist touchstone, B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, which are bound individually and presented in a box so that the reader can pick his own random order to read them in. Presented in a similar way, The Big Music could have been forgiven its constant reiterations – but it isn’t: it’s presented as 400-odd pages for you to read in sequential order. The sad thing is, I’m the most indulgent reader you could hope for. I forgive books their missteps and flaws readily, and I even found it easy to imagine why an author who’s built an incredibly complex structure for her novel would be miffed if no one twigged how much work had gone into it. But even my near endless goodwill was exhausted by these incessant, often smug-sounding footnotes. In the end I was tempted to make my own arrangement of the various sections by forcibly removing them from the book and scattering them in the air.
It’s not hard to recall what you’ve read before, even without the footnotes’ constant nagging, as this is a book in which nothing much really happens. It starts with a potentially electrifying scene – a dementia-ridden old man stalks off across the treacherous Highlands terrain with his abducted granddaughter – but what follows is curiously inert. The old man’s worsening illness is reason for his estranged son Callum to come home to the Highlands for the first time in many years; here the younger man must face not just his conflicted feelings for his father, but those he has for his half-sister Helen (whose child is the baby abducted in the opening scenes) and with whom Callum seems to have had an incestuous relationship when they were teenagers.
There’s little urgency to the way the story unfolds, if indeed “unfolds” is the word for a book which favours the interior over narrative: characters rehash memories over and over, dwell on the past, get stuck, cannot (like the plot) move forward. There are constantly recurring themes, leitmotifs, of privacy, creativity, solitude and loneliness, and the quietly dysfunctional relationships among family members who can barely talk to one another seem to mirror back and forth across the generations. And there are formally fascinating notions: the seven generations of the Sutherland Mackays parallel the seven notes of a musical scale, while the blasted terrain of the Highlands seems to inspire the bagpipes’ low and constant drone over which those notes skirl – but it all sits so flatly on the page. Despite Gunn’s able and convincing links between landscape and music, or love and creativity, the fact remains that stories are not tunes (and those damn footnotes are not gracenotes). A text that wants to be a piece of music is on a hiding to nothing.
On the plus side, Gunn’s writing can often be beautiful. There’s a touch of the gorgeous musicality of A.L. Kennedy’s prose when Gunn’s starts to gleam: likewise, she offers acute insights into the psychology of her characters, whose obsessive raking over the past has a touch of the Proustian. There are times when the characters start to breathe: you feel, at last, she’s not pushing the reader away with but bringing him closer. (It must be said that the best parts of The Big Music are, not coincidentally, those where Gunn allows the story to unfold for several pages at a time unencumbered by footnotes.) The results aren’t lasting: I never found myself emotionally involved in the characters’ stories, not least because the deliberate similarities in names – all Johns and Callums and John Callums – while presumably meant to, again, remind us the harmonics in sets of music notes, just make it irksomely difficult to keep clear who’s the son, who’s the father, and so on.
By the concluding section, irrelevant information – noise, rather than music – has taken over. Fifty pages from the end, we’re being told what crofters of the early 18th century would have eaten for their lunch. Every other chapter is a history lesson – specifically, the sort of history lesson you suffered through on a Friday afternoon while an uninterested teacher would reel off lifeless facts and stats. This reader, head growing heavy, felt a distant echo of the desire to carve his initials into the nearest desktop with a compass point. It’s not a question I normally ask of a novel, but I did find myself wondering why on earth The Big Music was telling me all this. Would there be a written test at the end?
After the 377 pages of – well, let’s say “story” – come an additional 80 pages of appendices, indices and “additional material”. On the one hand, this is supremely clever: just as the bagpipes’ music, properly played, should simply fade, its ghost echoing on when the song proper has come to an end, so too these materials prolong “the world” of the book after the story has ended. On the other, so much of this material has already leached into the preceding pages already that these seem pretty superfluous. Their purpose seems to be to leave the reader finally wondering how many layers in Gunn’s millefeuille have been fiction and how many fact. Maybe these pages are full of true histories; maybe they’re an elaborate authorial trick to intermix fiction and fact. Is there a Grey Longhouse up there in the Highlands, where the bagpipes are still taught? Are these architectural elevations of a real place? Is “B”, played on the pipes, really the “Note of Challenge” and “F” the “Note of Love”, or is that the novelist’s conceit? With an internet connection, it wouldn’t be too difficult to investigate further. It says much for The Big Music’s successes that it raises these questions, and much about its failures that this reader couldn’t be fashed to find the answers. - Neil Stewart
RAIN : A twelve year old girl spends summers at a lake with her parents and little brother. The days are long and hot and while the parents entertain their friends the two children are left alone to play and dream and let the future come down upon them. (Faber & Faber, 1994).
“ Taut, beautifully written; a fresh look at the volatile world of childhood.” – Edna O’Brien
“ Small masterpieces do not usually come as readable as this.” – Faye Weldon
“ Part intense reverie, part unbottled confession, this novel guides the reader through its emotional landscape as certainly as its characters move among the labyrinthine waterways.” – The New Yorker
THE KEEPSAKE: In the closed rooms of her own and her mother’s childhood, a daughter gradually comes to an understanding of the terrible intimacy of families. Raised on her mother’s dreams and stories of happiness with a father she never knew, she must relive and rewrite her mother’s tale of abandonment, addiction and desire. (Granta, 1997)
“Gunn has the originality of a poet. Her dangerous, shifting terrain is the underworld of female desire.” The Times
“Very rarely do books come along that make you gasp with their strangeness and beauty… Reading this book, you will realize you have forgotten to breathe.” Vogue
“A dreamlike mixture…Shot through with jewel-bright imagery.” Times Literary Supplement
THIS PLACE YOU RETURN TO IS HOME : A mother escapes to a remote country village only to make prisoners of her children; a young man’s violence must atone for his loneliness; a wife comes to fear the closeness of her own husband’s attentions… Haunted by the past , these stories explore the paradox of home. (Granta, 1999)
“A haunting debut collection…Weird and remarkably affecting… A small gem.” Kirkus Starred Review
“Like Raymond Carver, Gunn sketches scenes from the lives of ordinary, unhappy people with thin but vivid strokes.” Boston Phoenix
FEATHERSTONE : As we’re invited to spend the weekend in Featherstone, a small country town that seems to be like any other, we come to realize there’s something about the place that goes deep into the lives of the people who live there. (Faber & Faber, 2003)
“A parable of home and away, darkness and light…Featherstone sparkles like a shard of glass and cuts as deeply.” Jayne Anne Phillips
“ A novel that explores loneliness, failure and personal hurt with an uncompromising integrity.” The Scotsman
“Extraordinarily written, Gunn gives all of Featherstone a sense of being beautifully distinctive, eerily alive.” New York Times
THE BOY AND THE SEA At the start of a summer’s day, Ward is waiting on the beach. There’ll be a party later; girls will be there and the promise of the future. But for now, as the sun moves towards its highest point, the tide changes and Ward is faced with a dramatic event that will change his life forever.(Faber & Faber, 2006)
“A novel about masculinity that, unlike Hemingway, bypasses the macho.” Guardian.
“Beautiful, short and intense…A timeless sensuous quality… Suffused with the feel of summer’s long gone.” The Scotsman
“It is marvelous…The suspense is wonderfully managed – and the writing is magic. I felt joy at every word.” John Carey
44 THINGS(: “On the night of my forty-fourth birthday we went, my husband and I, with our two little girls, to the Brasserie at Brompton Cross. ‘When are you going to get back to writing that novel’ my husband asked me – and I put down my knife and fork.” Celebrating home and family, “44 things” tracks the moments and reflections captured in the midst of domestic life – in short stories, essays and letters and a new kind of writing that, while it may not be like taking on a large, uninterrupted literary project, is no less significant. (Atlantic Books, 2007)
“The quotidian is mediated by imagination and rendered into art.” Scottish Review of Books
“Her writing is spare and incredibly beautiful.” Good Housekeeping
“I adore this book and want to buy it for every woman I know… A lovely hymn to one woman’s ordinary life.” Eve
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.