FICTION: ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNEreviews The Song HouseBy Trezza Azzopardi Picador, 334pp, £12.99
'IT ISN'T visible from the house, but still Nell can feel its presence everywhere; brought in on the stagnant, oily air of a summer's night, in the wheedling sound of the mosquitoes as they trace her skin in the darkness, that sweeping metallic chill before dawn." The river – in the Berkshire Downs, a pretty spot – runs though this book as a unifying symbol and a powerful physical presence. The novel's great strength is its mesmeric sense of place: reading it, you steep yourself in the chosen location – rather as you experience the countryside in the fiction of John McGahern or Edna O'Brien, or Claire Keegan. It is as if Trezza Azzopardi had constructed a barge and ferried one along the stretch of river on the banks of which her motley set of characters live, like voles and weasels. In some ways the work resembles a grown up, sombre, version of The Wind in the Willows.
In her previous novels, Trezza Azzopardi has similarly succeeded in evoking a particular land or townscape – Norfolk in Winterton Blue, Cardiff in her Booker-shortlisted debut, The Hiding Place. And, like her previous work, this is a novel about lost memories. She deals with adults who have suffered trauma in youth, and who are trying to recall and confront its details. The central concern, the need to recall and then document those memories, is firmly fore-grounded. Kenneth Earl, an eccentric, likeable, gentleman (Toad of Toad Hall?), lives in a big old house, with lawns sweeping down to the water, a capacious wine cellar, and a delicious oaky library containing three and a half thousand records – the books, tellingly, are consigned to the music room: breaking boundaries, mixing things up, is a recurring trope. Kenneth hires Maggie Nix, the beautiful, self-harming, heroine, to write down his memories about various songs and compositions. He is, as we gradually realize, suffering from incipient dementia or Alzheimer's – although Trezza Azzopardi is far too subtle a writer to pigeonhole him with such tired terms (or with the word "alcoholic": we just observe that Kenneth resorts to the cellar more often than is wise). Maggie, 30 years his junior, is also in quest of a buried memory, which involves Kenneth, although he doesn't know it – she hides her identity, and the fact that she is a neighbour from a dilapidated fairytale cottage a few miles downstream. As in Anne Enright's The Gathering, the resistant bourn of memory is slowly dredged, until finally the secrets of the past are brought to light. The novel closes as Maggie attempts to tell, orally, her story to Kenneth – among the many suggestions thrown up by this dense book is one relating to the different ways in which we express deep feelings and memories: music, song, writing can all document emotion, but, Azzopardi seems to suggest, the simplest form of communication – talking – is both the most challenging and most redemptive.
The sub-stories are at least as engaging as the main plot, focusing on the relationship of Kenneth and Maggie. Her childhood, for instance, is utterly intriguing. Her parents belonged to what Alice Munro calls the “counter culture”:
“Will has seen what Leon has been doing this week: lying doped up in the sun, or sitting under the shade of the willow tree, drinking from a pint glass. Nell has taken to walking around half dressed, a striped bikini top and long skirt, or nothing at all on top and tiny little shorts, always barefoot. She lets the little one run around naked.” A more extended look at this hippy way of life, an aspect of the multi-cultural patchwork of the riverside, would have been welcome. Another brilliantly observed, but attenuated, section, deals with Maggie’s reactions to Nell’s death. Azzopardi has an astute eye for the delusions of the bereaved:
“For a long time, Maggie couldn’t believe her mother was gone. Often she’d hear her, singing, or talking back to the radio. Sometimes . . . she’d catch a hint of movement, and look up, and nearly see Nell, fidgeting in her sleep”.
A more serious flaw is that Maggie knows what happened to her from the outset – but the reader, and Kenneth Earl, must wait until almost the end of the novel to find out. And the secret, although refreshingly original, may strike some as a mite contrived. It is an event which has many partial analogues in legend, and also in fact, but that doesn’t mean it’s convincing, at least if read literally. Also, horrific as the revelation is, it lacks immediate shock value, at least for this possibly jaded reader.
No matter. This is not a thriller or a novel of sensation, but an original version of the archetypal tale of the quest for a stolen childhood. What delights are its language, depth of feeling, and above all its extraordinary synergy of sensual impressions, sounds, and ideas. Here is a verbal tapestry as rich and tangled as a thicket of riverweed. A Song Houseconfirms Trezza Azzopardi's status as a writer of exceptional poetic imagination and stylistic prowess.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer. She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing in UCD
