Divine music in a human world

For a novelist rooted so firmly in the 19th-century European tradition, the Indian writer Vikram Seth is a confirmed risk-taker, albeit a careful one. Each book presents a new direction. While for many, his adroitly imagined debut fiction The Golden Gate (1986), a clever verse novel composed partly in homage to Pushkin, which chronicles life in the shadow of California's famous bridge, is his finest achievement, Seth must be congratulated for performing the near-impossible with A Suit- able Boy (1993). In that mighty saga, spanning 1,349 pages of lively text, Seth borrowed heavily from the standard devices of the Victorian novel in creating - and sustaining - an engaging family story, replete with domestic rituals, pivoting throughout on marriage while also evoking the chaotic atmosphere of post-independence India.

This time, with An Equal Music, his first book in six years, he has turned to that most difficult of challenges - writing convincingly about classical music. It is an objective many fine writers, including Thomas Mann, have stumbled at. Yet Seth not only writes passionately about the music of Bach, Beethoven and Schubert, he captures the essential intimacy and emotion of it. While celebrating its beauty he does not fail to acknowledge the tension, frustration and terror which musicians experience in the pursuit of perfection, artistic truth and basic survival.

Michael Holme is a violinist whose main work is playing with the Maggiore Quartet, as volatile a bunch as one could hope to meet. As the novel opens he is living firmly within a self-imposed routine. There is his music; his tiny flat high above Kensington; the French girlfriend he sleeps with and otherwise barely tolerates, who is also one of his fee-paying students; and then there is his deep agony, which he tends with his characteristic intensity. This pain is the loss of a woman he left some 10 years earlier while a music student in Vienna.

From the outset, Seth ensures it is virtually impossible for any reader to miss the fact that his narrator is self-absorbed and in possession of an artistic temperament. Holme is also bright and a class removed from his colleagues in the quartet. While at least two of them, a petulantly warring brother and sister, are products of quasi-privilege Home Counties stock, Holme is a butcher's son from Rochdale, near Manchester. His interest in music was awakened when he was a child by a kindly, childless neighbour who was once a violinist. As a youth, Holme had to struggle to convince his bewildered parents, but the presence of Mrs Formby proved vital, even to providing him with the long-term loan of a quality instrument.

Caught as he is between two worlds, Holme is aware that he can fit into both, but that he now belongs fully to neither. As a narrator, he is intelligent, edgy and sensitive to the point of touchiness. In an astute display of characterisation, Seth repeatedly allows his fastidious hero to expose himself by his own words and actions. It soon becomes obvious that Holme lives in his own universe; has no real interest in anyone except himself; that he seldom thinks of his aged, widower father; and that his mourning for his lost love has become an extension of himself. So skilfully does Seth handle his peevishness, there is never any chance the reader will lose interest in the story.

While at heart an intense, old-fashioned romantic melodrama, An Equal Music is heavily plotted. Holme possesses all the watchfulness of the natural outsider. The other characters emerge as real personalities thanks to his relentless observing. Seth is also very good on the practical realities of making a living from music.

While tracking a recording of a little-known Beethoven string quintet, he suddenly sees Julia, the girl he lost, sitting upstairs on the bus next to the one he is aboard. An exciting chase ensues, and as Seth goes on to demonstrate throughout the book, he has a rare feel for describing states of panic. Frustration and loss eventually lead Holme to a breakdown. But before this, he has the joy of being reunited with Julia, still beautiful and loving, but now married and almost deaf. Seth's exploration of Holmes's helplessness is well handled and for all the romantic flourishes, including playing Vivaldi in the composer's church in Venice, the narrative is brutally realistic.

Such is the wealth of physical description countering the narrator's thoughts and memories, reading this novel is like watching a film. At times its cinematic qualities are almost oppressively apparent. There is a particularly tense auction sequence in which musicians, not dealers, battle for an instrument. But for its thoughtful, precise articulation of the tensions and emotions of music which are so effectively juxtaposed against the passions of a selfish but human central character, An Equal Music, with its graceful prose, elegance and occasional jarring outburst, engages and should certainly feature among this year's Booker contenders.