Klarinet Archive - Posting 000065.txt from 2004/04

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Semi-OT: fiction about Mozart diary
Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2004 19:17:01 -0400


I've just finished reading a novel of special interest to musicians who
play Mozart:

Harrison Gradwell Slater. Night Music: A Mystery. New York: Harcourt,
Inc., 2002.

The jacket flap calls Slater, "a Ph.D. in musicology and author of _In
Mozart's Footsteps_, a reference book about Mozart's travels," and "a
pianist who has given concerts all over the world." He sets the story in
England and in Europe, where he has travelled extensively. His real world
settings look convincing to me.

The first person narrator, budding Mozart scholar Matthew Pierce, attends
an auction where he lucks into a manuscript that might be an authentic
diary from Mozart's childhood travels. Slater's technical material about
forged manuscripts looks right to me and I find the Mozart sections of the
novel great fun to read. (Though I'm not an expert in detecting manuscript
forgeries, I'm interested in them, and have written about fake Jack the
Ripper diaries in a review of three "Ripperology" books, "New Masks for
Jack the Ripper," in Scarlet Street #19, Summer 1995, p. 69.) The
purported Mozart diary attracts the notice of a ruthless crime syndicate
intent on cornering the market on real *and* forged Mozart diaries for a
crooked financial scheme. Meanwhile, Matthew hopes the diary will give him
his personal ticket to scholarly recognition and maybe even a real job, if
he should live so long. Soon he receives an invitation to an exclusive,
three-week gathering of Mozart musicians and scholars at a rich man's
lavish estate, a party that becomes a movable feast when the bodies start
to drop. These "lifestyles of the rich and famous" house party settings,
gaudy fantasies of vast wealth and luxury, look contrived and a tad silly
to me.

The prose varies from good enough to annoying. Slater's background
knowledge is his strong point, but he hasn't figured out how much research
is too much to crowd into the story. He's mixed his facts and his fiction
with considerable skill. However, the narrative pace bogs down when he
uses dialogue for lengthy information dumps in the prose style of a
nonfiction essay, while the characters' own voices and personalities
disappear -- although, for me, these travel guides and technical
expositions are among the most intrinsically interesting parts of the book.
Irritatingly, narrator Matthew waffles between shrewdness and naiveté and
between courage and cowardice to suit the author's convenience, in this
"idiot plot" (Darrell Schweitzer's term for a plot that depends on
intelligent people behaving like idiots) that's too heavily driven by
coincidence. Slater moves stereotypical secondary characters around like
chess pieces. A copy-editor should have caught numerous clichés and
proofreading mistakes (individually insignificant, but they add up...).
Also, I wish a good editor had talked Slater into deleting a clunky,
superfluous frame story, in which the hospitalized Matthew recalls most of
this tale in extended flashbacks. Without the intrusive interludes in
PsychoBabylon while the narrator's doctor helps him recover his memory, the
story is a conventional crime drama, in straightforward chronological
order. The solutions to this semi-open, not-very-mysterious mystery plot
won't surprise a reader familiar with potboiler crime novels. Though
there's way too much Creative Writing 101 in this book, readers with a
special interest in Mozart may enjoy it anyway, and forgive the novel its
defects, as I do.

Lelia Loban
E-mail: lelialoban@-----.net
Web site (original music scores as audio or print-out):
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban

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