Music and Silence, by Rose Tremain
This novel, published in 1999 by Chatto and Windus, reveals the astonishing versatility of this writer, whose other novels include the vastly different contemporary story, The Way I Found Her.
Music and Silence takes place in Denmark in the 1600s, and carries with it a social atmosphere vastly different from the one we live in today.
Tremain's plot is complex and even the antagonist Kirsten Munk, the Danish King Christian's consort, evokes an ever more willing sympathy in the reader as she confides her awareness of her own dark side to her diary. Kirsten's personal missive, sprinkled with unnecessary Capital Letters, is where Kirsten Plots and Plans how to use others for her Own ends.
In this ancient setting of feudal Copenhagen, the dramatic portrayal of a flawed Danish king, his consort, an English lutanist, and the 'Almost Queen's' women stops just short of the grotesque. There is a certain soupcon of comedy here too.
The imagery is lush and unforgettable. Reading this book on my commute, I had to shake myself out of the heavy atmosphere of its strange scenes. Among the most bizarre for me were those portrarying the weird alterations in the personality of the Irish count after his wife wakes him in the midst of a dream of celestial music, and schoolteacher punishing the young King's dyslexic friend, Bror Brorson.
A hauntingly evocative image is that of a shivering orchestra confined to the basement of the castle so that at a signal from the king, they can play delightful music that comes up through a trapdoor into the Winter Room. King Christian veers between using this ethereal music to astonish his guests and consoling himself with the music of the his "Angel," the English lutanist, as the King's consort rejects and cuckolds him and his wealth and health deteriorate.
The voices in this novel are many and varied: the philosophical speeches and thoughts of the king and the diffident attempts of the lute player to answer his questions appropriately contrast sharply with the conversations between the crude outspokenness of Kirsten and the sympathetic and consoling voice of Emilia, her Woman.
In a tour de force of economic characterization, Tremain describes choir master Lionel Neve as "a man entirely content at each day's modest curve."
This is a suspenseful tale of human passions and the suffering they bring; it is an epic exploration of the many meanings of enslavement; it is an exotic tale in which "enchantment very often triumphs over scruple."