As readers know by now, I 'rediscovered' the novels of South Australian Michael Meehan late last year. In anticipation of his new novel An Ungrateful Instrument, (Transit Lounge, 2023) I resurrected from my reading journal a review of his first novel, The Salt of Broken Tears, (1999), and his second: Stormy Weather (2000), and a week after that, I'd retrieved from the TBR and reviewed Below the Styx (2010). I was smitten!

And now, An Ungrateful Instrument. I shall try not to gush, but seriously, this is one of the most exquisite books I've read in a long time.

This is a novel of fathers and sons; death and immortality; and the tension between originality and wanting to preserve things of beauty unchanged. It's about the glorious voice of a musical instrument — ephemeral until the advent of sound recording — and the silent but powerful voice of the writer. And it's about a world of privilege and power and the conditions in which creativity might flourish.

An Ungrateful Instrument begins with the melancholy voice of Charlotte-Elizabeth, an elective mute. She tells us of her brother Jean-Baptiste Forqueray who is beaten and brutalised by his father into being the musical prodigy he was himself as a boy. Antoine Forqueray performed before Louis XIV at the age of ten and was appointed as a court musician when still a teenager. In contrast with the elegance of courtly music, Antoine Forqueray's style is wild, energetic and fiendishly difficult. (A listener at YouTube describes him as 'a beast'. You can see why here.)

Brilliant, inventive, demonic' Antoine wants immortality, as so many men do, and he wants his son to be a reproduction of himself, following exactly the same path so that his own glory can transcend death and live on through his son and grandsons.

His self-belief in his own genius, fostered by the admiration of the king at Versailles, is such that he will not tolerate having his music written down, to be copied by his inferiors. Only he and his son can play it, and he beats the boy into perfect fidelity to what he hears his father play.

He beat Charlotte-Elizabeth viciously too, because he wanted her to be a prodigy as well, as evidence that his genius can even extend to siring a female prodigy. But she could not — or would not — play, and at eight she retreats into silence, a shadow always hovering on the edge of things, invisible and silent as women mostly are in the historical record.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/02/04/an-ungrateful-instrument-2023-by-michael-mee... ( )