An Equal Music

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

'Under the arrow of Eros I sit down and weep.' If this sentence hovers close to parody or pastiche, it is also poetic and plangent, with just a hint of self-mockery, and it perfectly distils the variegated tone of Seth's novel. An Equal Music is a love story in which the object of desire is as much the art of music as it is the elusive Julia. Michael, who tells the story in the present tense, plays the violin in a string quartet. The life of this group, its rehearsals, dependencies and tensions, is the quietly flowing current which provides some sense of fragile continuity to what might otherwise be too evanescent a novel. For this is a book about the impermanence of relationships and the nostalgia which governs so large a part of our existences. Readers expecting to return to the India of A Suitable Boy will be confounded - this is set mainly in central London, with Lancashire, Vienna and Venice also impinging upon the action. Seth's mastery of dialogue and his gentle nuanced descriptive art are, however, as subtle here as in anything he has written. This is a loving novel in which Terpsichore is the prevailing muse, not Eros. Review by ALASTAIR NIVEN, Director of the British Council (Kirkus UK)

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