The wait for a new novel from Andrea Goldsmith is nearly over: her ninth novel The Buried Life is due for release from Transit Lounge in March 2025, so I need to get cracking with the temptations of her backlist!
The last of her print editions on my TBR* was Facing the Music, from 1994, and of course I was always going to love it because I enjoy novels that explore the creative life.
This is the book description:
Composer Duncan Bayle has a passion for music. He is admired and famous but his genius has faltered. Juliet Bayle is passionate about Duncan. She shares his success but lives in his shadow. Anna, their talented daughter and once an inspiration to her father, has disappeared.
If Duncan is to create his greatest work Anna must return, but she had good cause to leave and even better reason to stay away.
Facing the Music explores the dark side of ambition and the ambiguous passions that surround creativity. What is a fair price to for an artistic life? And who should pay?
Who indeed? Who pays the price for genius of any kind?
This is a topic that arises again in Goldsmith’s 2013 novel, The Memory Trap, As I wrote in my review,
Ramsay Blake is a virtuoso pianist with an international career, but his obsession with his music makes him narcissistic, selfish and purposefully helpless. His stepfather George Tiller is lured into his orbit and becomes his helpmeet, pushing aside all others including Ramsay’s brother Sean. Zoe has no hope of reciprocal love from Ramsay, but she pursues it all the same, rationalising his more-than-appalling behaviour towards her, and damaging her relationship with Elliot.
Why do people do this?
There is a scent to success and it is wondrously powerful; it works like a pheromone on others, while acting as a catalyst for new work. In time, the successful person tends to accommodate to success — which matters not in the least as long as the work continues. (Facing the Music, p.3)
Though there are instances of men taking on this role (e.g. John George Robertson, the husband of author Henry Handel Richardson), women have been doing this support work since forever and not just in the creative industries. They support their men to be butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers; to be Big Deals in politics or in the corporate world and they’re usually doing the pack work in a small business too. In times past, it was just expected of women; today, it ought to be a conscious matter of choice and an equal partnership.
Duncan Bayle is an awful character. Hot-housed by his mother and taken on by Juliet who sees herself as a partner in his musical career as a composer of note, he is selfish and unreasonable and takes it for granted that the world exists to nurture his genius. Juliet is the one who provides the steady income; who doubles as his secretary/manager; and who (of course) is also the woman who takes care of the domestic responsibilities. His extra-marital liaisons are routine; his failure to acknowledge her is habit. And when their daughter Anna finally arcs up about Duncan steamrollering her career choices, Juliet acquiesces in the estrangement without a murmur. She puts up with it all because she thinks he is a genius.
The reader, familiar with the biographies of cranky musicians like Beethoven, ponders the issue: it’s easier to think that Duncan should not exploit his wife and child when his career is faltering, when his compositions are not very good. Let him buy and iron his own shirts, right? But what if he’s a genius like Beethoven? Should someone like Beethoven take a turn at the washing up or cooking dinner? Unsupported genius might mean less of — or even the loss of — magnificent music.
***
Andrea Goldsmith is one of the few authors I know who can evoke music with her pen. She writes about musical memory outlasting long absences from an instrument, and about the intimacy of music when played in a duet. And about …
…the pulse of music, the rhythms and phrasing and silences as they are drawn in through your arms and eyes and ears and that tense little nugget of the heart. (p.99)
This focus on music throughout makes Facing the Music a timeless novel.
She had always thought it a curious business how music takes off at precisely the point where language falters, and then, in an ironical twist, manages to turn back to the language and give it a second wind. Different conceptual systems they might be, although perhaps not so much. (p.52)
Two characters are discussing the way one might not ‘see’ the city of London when walking around it, but…
‘But then comes a piece of music, or a painting, or a book, and it opens your eyes, makes you see what’s been in front of you all the time. That’s exactly what I think you’ve done with London Nocturne.London’s a city most people would assign to full orchestra and symphonic form, not flute and piano. London’s not a showy city, it’s not brass and percussion and fifty strings in unison; take away the tower, St. Paul’s, Westminster, a few other monuments,’ he laughed, ‘what fabulous heresy! and what’s left is the living city and the torchlike clarity of flute and piano.’ (p.53)
Entrepreneur Eve and the cellist Madelaine, hear this piece for the first time and declare it brilliant, mesmerising, and utterly original. But it’s not Duncan’s music, it’s his daughter Anna’s. Without either of her parents caring that she was damaged by her upbringing as Duncan’s muse, and also not knowing that she’s become a composer or her stage name, Anna has a stellar career, which culminates at the end of the novel with father and daughter appearing at the same music festival.
That’s not to say that Goldsmith’s Anna resolves all the issues that derive from growing up in a dysfunctional family. While she likes and admires the solid relationship of the gay couple Eve and Madelaine, she’s not able to sustain long term relationships with either Lewis or Lucien, nor can she offer forgiveness to her mother when she has her identity crisis. The unanswered question at the end of the novel is, what’s the effect of all this on Anna’s daughter Lily.
*I also have Gracious Living (1989) and Under the Knife (1998) where they join 120 other novels tagged Kindle-to-read at Goodreads and I swear I am not going to forget about them the way I so often forget about what’s on the Kindle!
Author: Andrea Goldsmith
Title: Facing the Music
Publisher: Penguin, 1994
Cover design not acknowledged
ISBN: 9780140230727, pbk., 263 pages
Source: personal library, OpShopFind
Availability:
Facing the Music and other titles from her backlist are available as eBooks. See Andrea’s website for details.
