A Suitable Novel. Review on An Equal Music - Vikram Seth

Vikram Seth, who was born in India but educated in Britain and the United States, is contemporary literature's eminent Victorian. He first came to notice with an award-winning travel book, From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet. Next, and to much acclaim, he published The Golden Gate, a novel in verse inspired by a translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His translations of three Chinese poets together with his own slim volume The Humble Administrator's Garden followed.

In hindsight, this was merely a prolonged throat-clearing for his magnum opus, A Suitable Boy, a much admired three-decker novel on Victorian lines which dominated literary headlines during the early Nineties.

A Suitable Boy displayed Seth's love of storytelling and though it was clear he would not lightly undertake a fiction on such a scale, whatever he wrote next would exhibit his pleasure in the old-fashioned satisfactions of narrative and character. The upshot is An Equal Music, a lucid and ambitious attempt to capture the mysteries and perplexities of the musical life in prose. At the centre of the novel is a triangular love story between Michael, the violinist in the Maggiore string quartet, Michael's ex, and Julia, a professional pianist.

The unfolding of their on-off-on relationship is swathed in a highly wrought rococo construction of musical reference to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and virtually any composer who ever attempted a string quartet (Bartok, Shostakovich, Tippett, Carter and Ligeti) set against a backdrop of European musical capitals: Venice, Vienna and London.

Seth is always highly readable, deeply sympathetic to his characters, even when they seem to have stepped from central casting, and so exquisitely versed in the English and European cultural tradition that admirers of A Suitable Boy will wonder if his writing will ever return to the India of his birth.