The music of the night

    

    Here's a book you could not accuse of being bland, dull or slow! Patricia Duncker's new novel The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge is described as "a metaphysical mystery of astonishing verve and power", and that's not far off the mark.

    To the judge, first, and she is Dominique Carpentier, a juge d'instruction, or gatherer of evidence in the inquisitorial system. Based in the south of France, she is known as la chasseuse de sectes for her interest and expertise in investigating religious cults, suicide sects and the like, and she is famously shrewd, self-controlled, disciplined and efficient. The composer is Friedrich Grosz, renowned musician, commanding, audacious, the force of his personality always evident regardless of his mood. The two meet when the judge begins working on a bizarre case involving a mass suicide in the snow of the Jura. The dead are members of The Faith, "the night side of conventional belief, the Dark Host itself" - not a group of the vulnerable or easily duped, but one to which prominent figures in the arts and science belong.

   Who or what is behind the group and their deaths? The judge must find out, and with the help of her detective/lover Schweigen and a strange old book or grimoire, clues lead her from the medieval streets of Lübeck and a performance of Tristan und Isolde, to Lake Geneva, the British Museum, the Albert Hall and a dramatic conclusion at Jodrell Bank of all places!

    The plot canters along, sometimes collected, elsewhere with a few skittish bucks and rears where it might better have been taken in hand, and then it accelerates to what I thought was rather an abrupt finish, though it certainly carries all with it. Patricia Duncker seems to keep her characters at arm's length, both from herself and the reader, and that detachment is limiting; I'd like to have been shown a more human side of the judge, as perhaps of the messianic composer, and there is an almost inevitable coup de foudre which thus works on one level but is less convincing on another.

    Reason, faith, astronomy, ancient beliefs, the darkness and the light - it's all here: elemental, my dear Watson!

Comments

[ctussaud]

I thought this was rather a disappointing book, which did not altogether succeed (for me) in solving the whodunnit or the whydunnit; it was almost as if PD set out to write one sort of book, and ended up writing something not quite along those lines. The first half of the book was really terrific, but then I felt the objective had been lost and the plot freewheeled away with itself.

[Sandy]

Well this sounds intersting, if not perfect! I'm off to get it ...