From skylarks and bumblebees to the changing seasons and the sea, composers have long drawn inspiration from the natural world. In Discord, Jeremy Cooper’s eighth novel, Rebekah Rosen goes a step further, seeking inspiration not in nature itself but in a wartime diary chronicling the annual crops on a Peckham allotment.
She intends to use this natural code as the basis of a piece for saxophone and orchestra commissioned for the 2022 BBC Proms. Her chosen soloist is Evie Bennett, a rising star on the international stage. Cooper’s narrative traces their complex – indeed, discordant – collaboration, through alternating points of view.
Though both trained at the Royal College of Music, in other respects they are polar opposites. Rebekah, a semi-recluse, abandoned professional piano performance through a dread of public scrutiny. Her joyless marriage to a Devonshire farmer is only redeemed by the presence of a much loved stepson. At once highly principled and highly prejudiced, she decides against pursuing a divorce when the proposed solicitor’s ‘timbered mock-Tudor office’ offends her sensibilities.
Evie, 20 years Rebekah’s junior, is a far more resolute character. A socialist with ‘a lower-case s’, she deplores the country sports she observes when staying with Rebekah. Leading her own ensemble, she believes that her music has an educational as well as aesthetic function. She seeks to demystify the concert platform, wearing outfits such as high-cut culottes adorned with twinkling lights.
Cooper charts the ebb and flow of the women’s relationship with meticulous precision. His prose is rigorous, verging on the clinical. He shies away from overt emotion. The breakdown of Evie’s 13-year liaison, her mother’s breast cancer and her agent’s larceny are dispatched in a few understated sentences. As in earlier novels – Bolt from the Blue, which sets a mother-daughter relationship against the world of the Young British Artists, and Brian, which explores a solitary council worker’s lifetime of cinema-going – he focuses on the externals, offering detailed accounts of the women’s musical credos, influences and bugbears. (The American composer John Adams, for example, is unlikely to look kindly on Evie’s description of him as ‘a smug showman with eyes on stalks for the main chance’.)
Elvis Costello likened the notoriously difficult art of writing about music to ‘dancing about architecture’. In contemporary fiction, James Runcie has come closest to success with his Bach-based The Great Passion; but although the essence of Rebekah’s composition remains elusive, Cooper richly conveys the intricacies of artistic collaboration.
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