Fiction Addiction: 'The Conductor' - Music to my eyes

'The Conductor' and author Sarah Quigley. Photos / Supplied

Opinion

The compensation for reading a disappointing book is that it makes you better appreciate a satisfying one. My disenchantment over last month's feature book, When God Was A Rabbit, has heightened my enjoyment of this month's absorbing read, Sarah Quigley's The Conductor.

I'm relishing it so much that I resent having to put it down - even to write this update.

It's a novel based on the experiences of several Russian musicians, including the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Quigley's interpretation of the story (and there are others), Shostakovich writes his Seventh Symphony as a response to the famous siege, in which German troops surrounded the city for 900 days to terrorise the residents into surrender.

Eventually the composer is forced to evacuate but he sends his finished symphony back into the city through enemy lines. It lands in the emaciated hands of conductor Karl Eliasberg, who summons his starving second-rate orchestra to perform the work to rouse the besieged city. Stirring stuff. (None of this is a plot spoiler, by the way - it goes no further than the book jacket does.)

But Quigley, a celebrated New Zealand author, is a tease. It's fair to warn you that the symphony doesn't reach the conductor until page 248 of 300. The rest is a carefully orchestrated build-up. Being an impatient type with a couple of resident distractions of the patter-of-tiny-feet kind, I took a while to become captivated by this book.

(I note Otago Daily Times reviewer Bryan James has also commented on the "long, somewhat slow, first half of the novel", while being largely complimentary of the book as a whole.)

I decided last week to start again and give the novel the attention it deserved. So, deliciously alone on a rainy afternoon, I returned to the prologue with good intentions.

I have to confess: I got to page 48 before I skipped ahead to the spot where I'd left off in my first read. The problem is that it's so clearly signposted (by the book jacket and the publicity) where all lines will converge that I was eager to get to that point. Bugger re-reading the flashbacks to the characters' childhoods.

So now, finally, I'm at the crux of the story. As bombs blast chunks out of Leningrad and its people, Eliasberg is raising his baton in rehearsal.

And Quigley's painstakingly created characters seem so real I can almost feel the pain in their bodies and souls and hear their heart-wrenching music. I believe in these characters, I care what happens to them and I feel transported to Leningrad, circa 1942. And, yes, I have cried.

It helps that Quigley, who is also a poet, is a master of imagery. She writes of one character: "Despair seeped out of him like ink, spreading in a dark pool around him." Of another: "Whenever he raised or lowered his arms, drops of sweat ran like mice inside his shirt-sleeves." At a rehearsal: "The first woodwind chords fell across the room like shadows."

There's only one more thing you can ask for in a good novel: a great ending. And I can't wait to get there.

(I'm pleased to see that Christine is also enjoying her June feature book, The Beauty of Humanity Movement. Read her latest blog here.)