A good chunk of Patrick Langley’s brainy, sensitive second novel, “The Variations,” is set at the Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, a curious London institution sinking into decrepitude and disrepute. Its patients are musically talented but oddly stalked by voices clamoring in their heads; its treatment methods include New Agey rituals involving bells and other suspect tools that have made it the target of “accusations of quackery and iniquity.” The mood inside its creaky doors is at once suspect and magical — Manderley by way of Hogwarts.
But despite its eerie neo-gothic setting, “The Variations” has a charm and warmth that echo its intentions: Langley aspires to make the power of music tactile, to explore why it has such a pull on us. Central to his explorations is the Agnes’s most famous alumna, Selda Heddle, a late-20th-century cause célèbre in the classical world — a rare female composer to achieve such heights. She has recently been found dead in a blizzard near her manse in rural England. Soon after, her grandson, Wolf, arrives at the hospice in a panic, before lapsing into a coma. There’s some understandable worry that earworms have a body count.
Langley, a British art critic who’s published one previous novel, “Arkady” (2018), has a knack for stylistic and structural playfulness; he also has some savvy knowledge of contemporary composers. Langley evokes the mathematical, Philip Glass-ian structures of Selda’s work, inspired and undermined by the voices in her head. (Sometimes those voices are fittingly sing-songy, sometimes as bawdy as a British barroom.) According to the Agnes staff, those voices — which they call “the gift” — are typically those of ancestors demanding attention, though sometimes they’re just delivering a melody aching to be heard. The medley of sounds is to the novel’s benefit: “The Variations” pulses in a host of registers. The book is by turns funny, elegiac and crude, filled with the kind of chatter that might erupt when you open, as Selda thinks, “a clear channel” between the living and the dead.
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The novel also works because its woolier, more mystical elements are balanced by some well-imagined alternative history. The Agnes, we’re told, has its roots in the Agnes of Dartmoor, a 10th-century British Christian martyr who personified “the harmonic correspondence between the world of the living and that of the dead.” In the 16th century, a woman in Strasbourg, France, continued the tradition, breaking into song in the town center and gathering passels of followers. And Selda is in turn an heir to the gift, born during the blasts of the London Blitz and set on a path to become “this spectacular jukebox girl with her trancelike focus.”
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Though other characters get their turn, it’s Selda who sets the book’s tempo: She’s prickly, easily upset and diva-like, but she has a force. “I’ll give you a music degree in two words,” she tells a class of music students at one point. “Tension and release.” It’s a strategy that works for this novel as well. Its gothic touches are offset by its almost romantic vision of musical creation; its scenes of hereditary madness are braided around a very British dry humor. When Selda gets into a mental squabble with her gift, the mood is at once pathetic and funny: “Bring it to me, she says. Find it, the gift replies.”
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Novels about the classical-music world tend to be tales of artistic torment: You can look way back, to Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” (1947), for instance, but it’s practically de rigueur in contemporary literary fiction: Ian McEwan’s “Amsterdam” featured a scandalized British composer; Julian Barnes’s “The Noise of Time” captured Dmitri Shostakovich’s abuses under Stalinism; Richard Powers’s “The Time of Our Singing” braided musical genius and American racial violence; and Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Piano Teacher” featured a sex-obsessed and despairing woman in an abject relationship with a young student. (That last melodrama helped prove Jelinek worthy of the Nobel Prize.)
Langley isn’t playing that game — he writes about music not strictly as a source of genius gone awry but as a crucible of melody and history. Music, like our pasts, can be played with, remixed and shaped into new forms. To that end, “The Variations” is a curious but vibrant celebration of the unruliness of music. (New York Review Books is a good fit for this kind of counterintuitive work; the imprint has published offbeat works like Dorothy Baker’s exquisite 1938 jazz novel, “Young Man With a Horn,” and more recently, Paul Griffiths’s “Mr. Beethoven,” a counterfactual novel that imagined the composer visiting America.) The “gift” isn’t unique to music, of course; it’s a symbol of every bit of inspiration in our lives and how they occasionally drive us to distraction. As Selda muses: “Music … is inseparable from the rituals of life. No, more — it simply is life.”
Mark Athitakis is a critic in Phoenix and the author of “The New Midwest.”
The Variations
By Patrick Langley
New York Review Books. 472 pp. $19.95, paperback
