Harmony triumphantly achieved

Francis King

A LIFE'S MUSIC by Andrei Makine

Sceptre, £12.99, pp. 106, ISBN 034082008X

Like most human beings, most novelists arc neither outstandingly good nor outstandingly bad. This poses a problem for reviewers. A good novelist can write interestingly about mediocre characters; but even a superlative reviewer may find it difficult to write interestingly about mediocre novels. In consequence, reviewers all too often rush to the extremes of proclaiming a novel either a stinker or a masterpiece. In my own time, reviewers have called Anthony Powell the English Proust and C. P. Snow the English Balzac, and compared Olivia Manning's two wartime trilogies to War and Peace. When, some 50 years ago, I published a novel entitled The Widow, my publisher rang up in a state of rare excitement to tell me that a now forgotten reviewer had referred to me as 'Gibbon's successor'. Even if I had been a historian. I should have been appalled by such a preposterous hut no doubt wellintentioned accolade. Hyperbole and the derision that follows it can ultimately do the writer no good at all.

All this is a preamble to saying that, when I describe Andrel Makine as a great writer, this is no journalistic exaggeration but my wholly sincere estimate of a man of prodigious gifts. In his combination of clarity, concision, tenderness and elegiac lyricism, he is the heir to Ivan Bunin, the first Russian ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like Bunin, Makine was born and brought up in Russia, and became an emigre in France. Fortunately, perhaps because, unlike Bunin, he was still a young man, he then did not suffer Bunin's creative and psychological decline, but won the Priz Goncourt, the Prix Medicis and the Grand Prix RTL-Lire all within the space of less than 15 years.

The first remarkable thing about A Life's Music is that, though so short — at 106 pages no more than a novella — it tells the reader so much both about its central char

acter, Alexei, in particular, and about Homo sovieticus in general — of whom Alexel is so tragic, valiant and lucky an example. The capriciousness of luck, which somehow, against all the odds, allows Alexel' to survive the banishment of his parents to the Gulag, a dramatic switch of identity to avoid joining them, the enforced abandonment of his nascent career as a concert pianist, and the horrors of the last war, is a thread constantly glinting through the tunnel-like darkness of the existence through which he gropes his stumbling way.

The opening provides an astonishing tour de force of description. The narrator, who might be Makine, finds himself marooned in a remote railway station in the heart of the Urals, waiting, with innumerable other people, for a train that never comes. Here, he thinks, 'in this superabundance of space .. that equalises all delays, all lapses of time, all plans', is a microcosm of his country's whole history. All around him are sleeping people, huddled together against the cold, If they were summoned by a loudspeaker to set off to fight another war, they would at once obey with an utterly natural acceptance. If they were asked, in the midst of hunger, filth and cold, if they were happy, the answer would be an astonishing but unhesitating 'yes'.

Eventually the narrator wanders out of the crowded, stinking waiting-room to explore the upper storey of the station. He thinks that he hears music, and eventually comes on an old man playing the piano in the dark, the tears running down his cheeks. This is Alexei, once thought to have ahead of him a glittering career as a pianist but now no more than a piece of human jetsam washed up by history's random tide. The two men board the train together. Then, during a journey on and on through the mercilessly driving snow, the older tells the younger his story. He has lost everything except the most important thing of all — life itself.

As a young man, AlexeY watched as his parents, father a playwright and mother a singer, burned an incriminating violin that had once belonged to a Soviet general, a friend of theirs. Because this man had been liquidated, he had become someone dangerous ever to have known. As the flames engulfed the instrument, the snapping strings emitted a swift arpeggio. Later, when Alexei was engaged to be married to the daughter of a successful physicist, he began to recount this strange happening to her. She heedlessly interrupted him: 'Why don't you write a march for sports parades?' There are, he realises, two kinds of human music in the Soviet Union, and the second, the deafening music of sports parades and other such triumphal occasions, is drowning out that of the old violin immolated in the flames.

All through the Calvary of his existence Alexei constantly thinks that

the disorderly torrent of life and death, of beauty and horror, ought to have some hid

den meaning, a key that might give a rhythm to it all, shaping it into some kind of shining, tragic harmony.

But everything, he increasingly realises, happens merely by accident. It is Makine himself who brings to the tragic chaos of Alexas life the harmony that, even as an old man, the thwarted musician still craves in vain. It is through his peerless artistry that Makine manages to do this.

Part of this artistry is the manner in which, with a single phrase, he evokes a whole scene. Alexei comes on the sprawled body of a dead soldier — 'his bloodied face turned directly towards the sunrise, as if sunbathing' [my italics]. In another passage, as the narrator remains, for all his weariness, wholly awake, 'sleep retreats, like the undertow of a wave in which a child grasps at a half-glimpsed shell'.

A bilingual French friend has told me that the French in which Makine has written all his novels is as adventurous, buoyant and sparkling as Nabokov's English. The translator, Geoffrey Strachan, has produced an exemplary version.