Robert Ford: The Student Conductor

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON


Because this is a first novel, I'd assumed the author to be young, maybe around 30 like the "student conductor" of the title, so it was a surprise to find instead a rather grizzled man in his middle years. Or not so surprising — this is such a mature novel, so full of knowledge and understanding, of people, politics and music, that it's really quite a relief to know there's a reservoir of real life behind it.

So, an older man writes an astounding first novel about a younger man; and, American, sets his novel in Europe — West Germany in the last months of 1989, as the Iron Curtain frays and rends, and the Berlin Wall is torn down.

The cool restraint and directness of the dialogue, the privacy of the characters, gives this something of the feel of a European novel, yet in the grandiose announcement of themes, and also perhaps because the plot is based on the naive hope for a brand new beginning leap-frogging yesterday's aftermath, it's ultimately, unmistakably American. But, of course, we never can leap-frog our mistakes. As Europe knows, the present just can't wrench its boots out of the past.

History here is more double-helix than linear: Brahms, Goethe, the camps of World War II, the Stasi-inspired paranoia of East Germany — all these things are loud noises in the late-20th century world Ford creates, his characters all, in one way or another, fallen soldiers in the struggle against history.

Eight years before this story opens, Cooper Barrow fled New York's Juilliard School where he was an extremely promising conductor, and went into debasing hibernation, wasting his talent at weddings and suchlike.

Now, attempting to restart his career, he travels to the West German city of Karlsruhe to study under the enigmatic, impossible maestro Karlheinz Ziegler. The maestro's personal agonies stretch back to the war, although just what they are, and their precise relation to the present in which Barrow finds himself, we must read almost to the end of the book to discover.

There's love, too, of an agonisingly halting, uncertain kind, between Barrow and the talented oboist and East German defector Petra Vogel, and there's enormous skill and subtlety in the way Ford controls the various strands to his story, only occasionally allowing us to see that they are all part of the same.

And through it all — a glorious, emotionally compelling soundtrack — is the music of Germany herself, the great composers whose work has scored German history for nearly two centuries. Ford is very specific, very technical and yet forcefully emotional.

Many writers try to convey music through words, but it's rare to succeed in any visceral sense, and perhaps the most successful are the ones who achieve what, in the end, Ziegler accuses Barrow of failing at: negotiating that turbulent intersection between intelligence and emotion.

"Where am I weak?" Barrow asks.

"At the place where they meet," Ziegler replies.

But it's precisely at this point that Ford himself is strong. It's a powerful novel he's written, his themes and the questions he raises about man, God and power, and also about guilt and forgiveness, ambition and defeat, are really in the grand style of the cultural masters whose work he, in effect, reproduces here. The tension never lets up, drawing us on through the rush of the full orchestra to the moaning, soaring finish.

Allen & Unwin, $27.95