British novelist Deborah Levy’s August Blue, out earlier this year in the US with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has superficial similarities to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995), and underneath that, there is a more considerable linkage. Both are narrated by international concert pianists with obscured personal histories which are to be partly revealed through strange, memory-jogging circumstances, and while Levy’s novel narrates the aftermath of a recital whereas Ishiguro’s narrates the preparations for one, both plots involve uncanny repetition and dreamlike incident. The two protagonists are necessarily peripatetic, with unsettled and at least partly rural childhoods in England, and now years of European touring behind them. Levy’s Elsa Anderson really is unmoored from family save for an adoptive father, her piano teacher, whereas Ishiguro’s Ryder curiously meets with a woman and her son who he realizes are his wife and son or stepson, and anticipates his parents’ arrival to see his performance. August Blue moves between Paris, London, and Athens, following the disastrous concert in Vienna; The Unconsoled is set in an unnamed central European city, apparently smaller and of less stature than Ryder’s other professional stops. The Unconsoled is richer with possibilities for analogy between writer and musician than is the much shorter and more elliptical August Blue, but in both cases the analogy is limited in an interesting way, considering the distinction between the writer as creator or at least arranger of a fictional world versus the concert musician as the interpreter of someone else’s material.
Levy’s story suggests that her pianist Elsa might write her own scores and stop playing Rachmaninoff, and the death of her teacher Arthur is both sad, and a release from professional and patriarchal stricture into a more self-charted future. The excavation of Elsa’s past, involving a letter in Arthur’s possession, is probably going to prove liberating. No pesky children have shown up, and in fact the most important of Elsa’s relationships at the story’s end is with a doppelganger whom she saw in Athens and with whom she became a little obsessed. Levy seems to have taken some of the thematic baggage from Ishiguro’s novel and taken it on her European tour which, it turns out, is really a feminist quest for self-knowledge. The Unconsoled fascinates more than it entertains, and it is weirdly fascinating. It is not “interesting”. Ishiguro effects a suspension of standard criteria: neither plausibility, consistency, nor distinct characterization can be found, nor will they be missed. It seems possible considering the intervention of twenty eight years that Levy, if she indeed read it, was not aware of how much it shaped her novel. It may have that kind of power.
When Ryder arrives at his hotel, a few days away from the concert on the Thursday at which he is expected to give some kind of speech as well as a performance, he’s hoping to receive a schedule. He is expected to have it or know it already, and he can’t quite ask the young Miss Stratmann at the hotel for a copy. He will have many favors asked of him that delay or prevent his getting through his main obligations. In Chapter Two alone, Hoffman the hotel manager asks him to look at his wife’s albums of cuttings which track his concert career, Hoffman’s son Stephen, who will be playing a piece on Thursday, asks him to listen as he practices it and give him some advice, and Gustav the porter asks him to talk to his daughter Sophie, who it turns out is Ryder’s wife. They all give lengthy explanations of their situations, professional and personal, mostly in the same stilted language shared by Ryder’s narration. The situations are not yet absurd, but things are off: the elevator ride up with Gustav takes five minutes, long enough for Gustav to narrate a visit to Lucerne and his difficulties with Sophie, and Miss Stratmann is in the elevator with them but somehow unnoticed until it is time for her to speak. The favors become much more complicated and tedious than they had seemed, and are interrupted by the appearance of Ryder’s English school friends and many importunate strangers.
Besides the dilated elevator ride, Miss Stratmann’s convenient concealment, and Ryder’s unique amnesia, Ishiguro works with several other unreal elements. The unnamed city is fantastic, with underground passages connecting homes out in the country to Ryder’s hotel, and a wall built right across a road in the way between him and the concert venue. Ryder is offered the use of a practice room which turns out to be a bathroom with a piano in one of the cubicles. The narrator occasionally becomes omniscient, or at least freed from bodily confinement: he follows Stephen from the parked car into Miss Collins’ house to witness their conversation, without leaving the car. Episodes connect with one another in the manner of dreams, in which one association can abruptly change the story, and people appear as if on demand to keep Ryder busy.
The dialogue is perturbing in a very different way, in that it leaves no mystery at all. In one of the more comic scenes a journalist and a photographer assigned to cover Ryder’s concert talk in front of him about how they will flatter and deceive him, and then turn to him and begin the performance. Ishiguro seems to be using an absurd scheme to uncover conventional dishonesty, and Ryder takes no offense, even when the journalist says that “the way he keeps stroking his hands together makes my flesh creep”. Elsewhere the unrealism is not just how much everyone tells him, but how clearly it is all articulated. Most characters besides Ryder, and Sophie’s moody child Boris, who may be his son, give multiple monologues of at least a page in length, which explain their histories and ambitions, and provide context for each of the main storylines. The sheer lengths of speech they go to, long uninterrupted by Ryder, are a kind of repeated joke that critics seem to have missed. Many of them speak on behalf of the city, which is trying to compete with other European cultural capitols: “that in itself was hardly sufficient to put into reverse the spiral of misery gaining ever greater momentum at the heart of our community.” Stephen explains his personal preoccupation thoroughly and with only a little emotion: “Mother in particular seemed to resign herself to the idea that it had all been for nothing, all the effort she’d gone to, all the years with Mrs Tilkowski, that time she’d gone, to beg her to take me back, all of it…”
The theme everywhere is performance, through which Stephen hopes to please his parents, a conductor Brodsky to win back his beloved Miss Collins, and the city to improve its reputation. There are elaborate backstories of competing musical theories, Brodsky’s alcoholism, and Stephen’s disappointment of his art patron parents, and these rather overdetermine the stakes of the final concert. All the apparent disorder and discontinuity conceals a very neat, perhaps more filmic than novelistic convergence of storylines. Readers cannot but notice that Ryder, whose mentorship Stephen seeks, has his own parental drama, and that his admiration of Stephen’s playing for finding something new in the repertoire suggests some kinship, but such sympathies are not to be taken straight. We might try to make something of Brodsky’s controversial conducting and of the city’s desperate investment in music, but the novel’s version of concert music is an entirely fictional one—with pieces like Mullery’s Verticality or Kazan’s Glass Passions, and the terms “crushed cadence” and “pigmented triads”—and Ryder is not a reliable guide to any of it. Music has become something like a religion, and Ryder greeted as a potential savior. The way the city’s musical history is discussed, made into a kind of myth, recalls Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.
In his review of The Unconsoled, which, by comparison with Kafka’s work, he found lacking in physical detail and engagement with “the social shape of our age”, novelist and music composer Amit Chaudhuri found a consoling “positive way of looking at this Kafkaesque work” in the analogy between the international concert musician and the author. Ryder is asked about those “pigmented triads” as an author might be asked about writing in the third person, and the novel was surely informed by Ishiguro’s experiences on book tours. But the analogy is limited in a way so obvious as to be easily missed. The past and future of Ryder’s career, beyond the knowledge that he is very distinguished, are a mystery, and the novel sees him practicing, but not performing. There are certain satisfactions, closures, and disastrous crescendoes near the end, but The Unconsoled is something of a shaggy dog story: what with managing the many favors and overseeing Brodsky and Stephen, Ryder never gets to give his speech and recital as part of the concert. As the sun has already risen and the audience left the hall, his only performance can be his narration. It is stiff, strange, and has some affecting passages, and more than anything, it is disconcerting.