An Equal Music- A review

It's been my the most favorite book, ever since I've read it which is 12 years back and I'm still in love with it, and here is review which was written 10 years back

“AN EQUAL MUSIC”

                                                                                         By - Vikram Seth

 A world of melodies beautifully woven around a melancholic love story.  An Equal Music is a heartrending saga of a lost love which however never looses its existence in the life of the lovers and rekindles itself to be extinguished once again.

The plot of the book is based on love and music, or to put in another words it’s ‘love for the music’.  The story revolves around Michael, a violinist who plays in a quartet and who is still haunted by the ghost of a foregone relationship, a relationship with Julia, the pianist with whom he had fallen in love 10 years back while in Vienna, and with whom he actually has never fallen out of love, a loss which he has never been able to retrieve. After 10 years of their falling apart and losing each other one day Michael happens to spot Julia on a bus on a street in London and he can’t help himself from pursuing her again. Julia is now married to a banker and has a son, and apart from these new developments in her life there is one more secret…. she is going deaf, but none of these stop her from getting involved with Michael once more. So the broken strings of love are reunited by both of them but to lose it all once again.

The background of the book is based in places like London, Vienna, Venice and Rochdale and of course the writer’s skill as a travel writer is well evident by the vivid portrayal of these places. The music, the emotions and the places go together hand in hand in this book, each of them lead to another one and all are beautifully interwoven.  With just a handful of characters the book never leads to any confusion for the readers. The central characters being Michael Holmes (who narrates the book) and Julia McNicholl, other than them is Virginie, the young French girlfriend of Michael who also happens to be one of his students, then two other characters are Julia’s husband and her son, and few others like the rest of the members of Maggiore quartet where Michael belongs, Michael’s father in Rochdale and Mrs. Formby whose fiddle is what Michael plays. Each character has his/her own charms and oddities. Both the central characters seem to be at a war with their own inner selves, they are torn between love and duty, faith and fidelity, silence and music. In spite of having quite melodramatic situations and circumstances like, the agony and pain of a musician going deaf ,or the constant insecurity of Michael about losing the only two objects of love in his life, Julia and his violin, the story is not overtly dramatized . At the end of the story music wins and music survives and that gives the answer to all their questions, and gives the hope to all their despairs, and as Michael says at the end: “Such music is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music--not too much or the soul could not sustain it--from time to time” this sentence explains it all, though the characters loose their love but the real love of their life is music, which shall always remain with them.

With this book Vikram Seth once again proves himself to be one the finest writers of his generation. His range needs no further explanation, as the book itself shows how its characters n music belongs to an entirely different world when compared to a historical world of post-independence India that was depicted in Seth’s A Suitable Boy”. An equal music blends two different forms of art (music and literature) so very well that the emerging equation is simply a delight to go through. The symphonies and the sonatas are described with such fine details that the reader can actually hear the music being played. The language is poetic and needless to say beautiful…. “Who must follow these prerogatives, these hidden histories of the chameleon word ‘love’?” sentences like these which enrich this book are a delight for both mind and heart. And in this pragmatic world if at all Love with all its beauty, complexities and divinity is considered to be a form of art then for sure the writer excels in that aspect too by wonderfully merging these beautiful forms of art and these substantial expressions of human emotions into a very pleasantly painful musical experience called An Equal Music – an equal music that will keep echoing in the ears of readers long after it has been read.