AN EQUAL MUSIC By Vikram Seth, Viking, Rs 500 Michael, the first person narrator of this skilfully written novel, is the second violinist of the Maggiore Quartet based in London. Buckling under the overbearing manner of his teacher, he had suddenly left Vienna, losing thereby Julia, a talented pianist, the one and only love in his life. The novel follows the sudden resumption and troubled progress of their love ? now extramarital since Julia is married and has a son ? through London, Vienna and Venice to inevitable separation once again. The iterative pattern involving the loss and retrieval of love is ingeniously paralleled in Michael?s musical life. The novel takes us on a musical journey beginning with the polyphonic music of Bach and following a kind of tradition through the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. The complex unity and intimacy of different voices ? trio, quartet, quintet ? are reluctantly extended to Brahms and no further. Is there an underlying design in such a selection? Perhaps there is. Having first met Julia in Vienna where she had played a Mozart sonata, Michael learns to love Bach in her company and through her playing. It was ?when she had played by herself, to herself ? a suite, say, or an invention, or a fugue? ? that he had most completely yielded his being to Bach, and to her. It is not entirely fortuitous therefore that the Maggiore Quartet plays the first contrapunctus of Bach?s ?Art of Fugue? as an encore after the Wigmore Hall concert; it impulsively draws Julia backstage and thereby rekindles their passion. The Quartet is offered a complete recording of the ?Art of Fugue? by Stratus, while after her final breakup with Michael, Julia announces it in her programme at the same Wigmore Hall. This news virtually unhinges Michael at the rehearsals for the recording ? ?She has made me redundant, she has downsized me? ? and leads to his breakup with the Quartet. At the performance of the Trout quintet in Vienna, with Julia on the piano, the thought of her never again being able to play with him because of her increasing deafness together with the memory of having come apart at his last concert in Vienna precipitate Michael?s nervous breakdown. Early in the novel, the loss of Julia turns him to Beethoven?s piano trio in C minor, her favourite. When Virginie, his student, tells him that Beethoven had rearranged it as a string quintet, this becomes a metaphor for a fresh lease of life to the Michael-Julia relationship. The discovery, loss and miraculous recovery of the Beethoven LP run parallel to the fleeting glimpse of Julia and her incredible return to Michael?s life. The revival of their love reminds us of the way a theme returns in music, recognizable yet transformed. Even the imminent loss and last minute recovery of the violin prepares us for the restorative effect of Julia?s concert: love and music come together in their essential fugitive quality, fostering a quasi-Wordsworthian mood of blessedness. At a more everyday level we remember that the Quartet wants Michael back and the recording offer is still open. Michael is placed in a web of relationships, memories and experiences that are widely disparate: the butcher?s family in the north into which he was born, the vastly different class affiliation of Julia, the liaison with Virginie ? 16 years younger than him ? the members of the Quartet with their interplay of will, emotion and anxiety, the hearty male camaraderie of the Water Serpents, and so on. Seth presents this intricate web somewhat on the model of a fugue: his adroit control of multiple layers and levels is enriched by the manipulation of time and space. Of course, the analogical musical structure is not an innovation in European literature. The modern attempt to capture in art an inclusive heterogeneity, a Bergsonian duree as well as the daemonic element in human experience has often been inspired by music, its freedom from sequential narrative continuity. But Seth deserves credit for the way he has planned it out. The basic contrapuntal character of the fugue is anchored in the opposition between life and art; this is then explored, as in music, on various levels. In a sense, the novel is the portrait of the artist as no longer a young man. Michael is a mediator between self-absorbed solitude and everyday sociability. If he withdraws from an insensitive, smug world into the self-sufficiency of music, the soundproof music cell in his top floor retreat, he is driven by the claustrophobia to the vistas opened up through his window, to the park and above all to Rochdale in clear reach of the moors where the song of the ascending lark, Meredith?s poem on it and Vaughan Williams?s musical rendering of it produce a fine amalgam of art and life. It remains an abiding link with his roots, with Mrs Formby without whose help and encouragement he could not have become a violinist. To the transporting delight of music Seth shrewdly provides the counterpoint of sheer plodding labour that lies behind it. The emphasis on technique, rehearsal and post-mortem of performances gives the novel a musical authenticity, for the rigorous discipline ? ?Only my daily rigours keep me clear? ? recalls the frenesie journaliere that Baudelaire writes about. Every rehearsal of the Maggiore Quartet begins with all four instruments playing the scale in unison: the release and restfulness that this induces amount to a freedom from the will making the player himself/herself a subtle instrument of alert and keen passivity. While the relationship between ?exactitude and expressivity? is an organizing strategy of the novel, the anarchy and turbulence that are presupposed in the anxious need for daily rigour are not equally in evidence. This is particularly disappointing because Seth seems to aim at an alternative to the overworked vein of restlessness in modern literature: his choice of chamber music seems to be an indication to that effect. But a somewhat disproportionate and exclusive focus on the serene and the delicate or finespun has given an otherwise fluent and frugal style a somewhat glazed, porcelain like effect. At times it seems too neat and tidy, too well planned and schematic. It is as if Seth has given us Yeats?s ?Byzantium? minus the fury and the mire of human veins.