In his recently published A History of the Novel in Britain, Philip Hensher makes a bold claim. Historical novels, he tells us, don’t last. However popular and prestigious a historical novel might be in its day, it will almost always get thrown overboard as the ship of literary culture sails on, piled high with novels of contemporary life.
He might be on to something. Who now prefers Walter Scott to Jane Austen? The historical novel risks a double obsolescence, courting a future in which it has become an old-fashioned vision of an old-fashioned time.
However much this news might dismay writers of historical novels, Hensher is untroubled: “As readers enjoying our contemporaries, we should not let our readerly pleasures be affected by the probability of ultimate oblivion.” Will the future, what there is of it, rate Wolf Hall as highly as we do? Posterity, as Gore Vidal once wrote, is “a permanent darkness where no whistle sounds”. What matters is us, now, what we make of history and of our lives – in our novels and elsewhere.
Posterity and its ironies form a central theme of Yiyun Li’s new historical novel. In several senses Music Against the Night isn’t, in fact, “a historical novel” – certainly not in the supermarket-own-brand sense of a cosplay adventure in which affable protagonists find themselves chatting with Byron or whoever. Readers of Li will already know that she soars far above the well-meant strivings of lesser writers, occupying a luminous realm of her own.
She has the craft that makes craft invisible, and the art that makes art itself her obsessive subject. In Music Against the Night the art is music, as perceived through the lives, and the real and hoped-for afterlives, of two musicians. Real musicians, as it happens: a married couple, bound by a “contrapuntal fate”.
The pianist and composer John Field, born in Dublin in 1782, is now remembered as the inventor of the nocturne, the form perfected by Chopin. There is a room in the National Concert Hall in Dublin called The Field Room. But to listen to Field’s nocturnes when you know Chopin’s is to ponder the gulf between talent and genius.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
