The Variations
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An eerie ability is passed from grandmother to grandson—who now must reckon with a new cacophony of voices and sounds, all from the past, overlaying his life in the present—in this stirring new novel from one of the UK’s most exciting young writers.
Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift—an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past.
When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty—or impossibility—of living with the past.
"If Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black were written by John Banville channelling M. John Harrison, the result would look something like this. And yet Langley has made something new and unexpected about how the present is, necessarily and always, an echo corridor of the past. Beautifully written, powered by a wonderfully intelligent conceptual dynamo, and deftly sprung with surprises, The Variations is an utterly original book about haunting. It is strange, resonant, and, yes, haunting."— Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The wonderful latest from Langley (Arkady) tells the story of a British avant-garde composer, semi-estranged from her family and friends, who dies while walking in a snowstorm in Cornwall. Selda Heddle is found clutching her cherished bell, made for her by her former friend Ellen Montague. Ellen narrates the first part of the novel, which takes place shortly after Selda's death in the present day at Agnes's Hospice for the Acoustically Gifted, where she and Selda were wards in the late 1950s, and where Ellen is now dean. The "acoustically gifted" are not merely musical prodigies. Their "gift" allows them to hear the voices of their dead ancestors, an experience that can produce a state of distress easily mistaken for insanity. It is in such a mysterious and alarming condition that Wolf, Selda's grandson, appears on the doorstep of the hospice, demanding a lobotomy and singing Selda's masterpiece "Snow Trio." In the wake of this dramatic entrance appears Anya, Wolf's mother and Selda's daughter. With her arrival, the story of four generations of "gifted" individuals unfolds, taking readers from WWII to the present, from Selda's birth to her death. Langley is a mesmerizing guide to Selda's music and the fantastical world of the hospice, a "variously demonized, patronized, scorned, venerated, vilified, and today largely ignored and near-bankrupted institution." This is exquisite.
