The Devil's Music - Jane Rusbridge

[bookgazing]

If I say that ‘The Devil’s Music’ starts with a glossary of knots, it might sound like a tough old read. I meant to make it my third book during the 48 hour read-a-thon, but when I saw pictures of knots accompanied by explanations of how to form them I put it down thinking it would be full of complex terminology and literary, but dense prose that needed to be decoded.

Imagine my surprise then when I returned to it and found that its prose is the straight forward stuff of a typical contemporary novel. The words Jane Rusbridge chooses are beautiful and in places her prose is full of a deep, soothing rhythm:

‘The sea has sculpted the shingle banks into curves and scoops. I will collect smooth black pebbles. They warm in my hands and lend a weight to my pockets as I clamber over the rough wooden breakwaters. The breeze invigorates. Perhaps, after all, this will be alright.’

but her language is also plain and easy prose chosen for its solidity and story telling capability. Rusbridge does not use any obvious special literary techniques to distinguish her language, but below the surface reoccurring symbols flit. This combination of deceptively simple prose and hidden symbols is a perfect fit for the rather too self-contained main character she presents.
Readers first meet Andrew as a drifting young man, who has decided to return to his childhood home after his father has died. While Rusbridge makes his narrative clear and plain, she takes her novel into more complex territory by using more than one narrative voice. After using a first person narrative to establish twenty something Andrew’s dislike for his father and his troubled relationship with his younger sister Susie, Rusbridge gives the reader a new first person perspective narrated by Andrew as a young child, Andy.

Andy lives with a loving mother, his abusive father and his two younger sisters Susie and Elaine. Andy is obsessed with Harry Houdini and loves working with knots, as his Grampy used to be a rope maker. His various Houdini style antics worry his parents and get him in serious trouble with his impatient father. At the family’s holiday let, called ‘The Siding’ something happens to Andy that affects his life forever. This event changes him into the drifting young man readers meet as he returns to ‘The Siding’ to make it ready for prospective buyers.

Rusbridge alternates between these two perspectives regularly, switching from older Andrew in the present to younger Andy in the past. She also switches from first person to third person narrative, by including a third perspective. The third person narrative, is set in the past and follows Andy’s mother’s life in parallel to young Andy’s experiences. I assumed that the use of the third person indicated that this narrative was the story Andrew had constructed about his mother. Andy’s mother, is regularly beaten by Andy’s father and worn down by a world that wants her to give up Elaine, who is disabled. When she meets a young painter with a disabled brother a friendship slowly turns into a love affair.

Andrew’s mother’s narrative feels the most emotionally open and in my opinion this emotional honesty makes her easier to relate to than Andrew. Andrew is always closed off from the reader, even though his thoughts are directly available through his two first person narratives. Strangely instead of allowing the reader to see more than they might from the outside, the effect of Andrew’s first person narrative is to close him off from the reader. When he is a child he is cushioned from awareness of the world and never speaks directly about the childhood trauma he experiences, preferring to talk about it at a remove, or stopping before verbalising the full significance of what has happened.

As an older character Andrew often lacks self-awareness, keeping the reader distanced from his deepest thoughts again even as he reports what shaped him into the man he is. In contrast the reader sees his mother’s frustrations and reasoning in detail. They are directly exposed to the violent actions of Andy’s father. Everything feels more raw, more real, but if this is Andrew telling a constructed story does that make any difference to how the reader relates to the story they’re hearing?

I suspect that the use of three narratives ties in with Andrew’s work with rope and is intended to symbolise the different strands of life that create the core of a story, but I’m not quite sure what this connection between structure and story is designed to show. In the end I think that my inability to interpret the hidden meanings of Rusbridge’s novel was what caused me to feel distanced from her characters. While the plain writing provides easy access to a detailed family story there are deeper truths to be uncovered by close reading and perhaps re-reading. I could make some sense of the different meanings associated with the repeated symbol of rope and knots, but sometimes I could not fathom why a particular kind of knot was significantly mentioned.

Other small details like the ‘devil’s music’ of the title were repeatedly mentioned, without seeming to connect to a deeper meaning. Perhaps they were too deeply hidden for me to find, or maybe a little too obscure to be interpreted. Perhaps some of the recurring references aren’t meant to be symbolic and were included for some other purpose. I couldn’t quite work it out. I think this book required more time than I had to give it and I recommend making sure you’ve got an hour to invest when you start reading it so that you can spot all the links running through the different narrative strands.

If you make sure you have long periods of time to read ‘The Devil’s Music’ perhaps you’ll see the ending coming before I did. My one major criticism of the book is the abruptness of the ending, but It’s hard to talk about without spoiling the plot so let’s just say that something is revealed and I was not expecting it. Now that I look back on it I can see subtle indications that something in the past was not as it seemed, but at the time it seemed like a very sudden revelation and I was rather annoyed.

Then the epilogue arrived and if all was not forgiven, it was at least soothed through a wonderful snapshot of a life we hadn’t yet heard about. Is it strange to say that I actually found the epilogue the most assured part of the book? It flitted between tiny details and pictures of relationships that felt well established and true, even though they’re only mentioned in a few pages. Perhaps that’s what I would have liked to see more of in the main book, more connection between characters, but since the main point of the novel is the disconnection of the characters I’m asking for something that doesn’t fit with the book. I suspect Jane Rusbridge is good at explaining what connects people with the wave of her pen and so I hope to see this talent fully displayed in future books.

Just a quick mention that the author sent me this book for free, after reading my review of ‘The Still Point’. It is always nice to hear from authors who want to give you shiny hardbacks so thanks to Jane for providing me with her book (but don’t all rush to it authors as my tbr piles are wobbling as it is). She's so nice her website let's you read the opening pages of 'The Devil's Music' for free if you like.