The Music Room

 

    Sometimes the most special books are the hardest ones to write about, and after three false starts it was looking as though this post would end up a brief one if it made it to published status at all: identifying fine writing is much easier than analysing it. However, just saying 'read this book' won't do, so let me try to explain why I think it is worth seeking out.

    I've no idea what possessed me to pick up a copy of William Fiennes' The Snow Geese in a bookshop a few years ago - as someone who doesn't care much for birds, this account of the author's travels on the migration routes of the snow geese through North America would not be typical reading, but the impulse probably had to do with the cover quote: "A beautifully quiet, beautifully solitary and beautifully reflective book". It is all that, and avians nothwithstanding, I loved it.

    So keen was I to read William Fiennes' second book, The Music Room, that after snapping it up I stowed it in my bag on a flight to London for a day at Wimbledon. I should have known that that sort of frenetic environment was not the place to take in something 'quiet, solitary and reflective', so it was put aside then and only now picked up again, but at last I've read it and it is all I'd hoped.

    It is a memoir of a family and their home, but it's also a book about childhood and growing up, about parents' instincts to nurture and protect their offspring, about the accommodations - both small and subtle and large and distinct - which all families make when there is imbalance somewhere and when one of their number needs more care than most. It's the story of the Fiennes' home Broughton Castle, a fortified manor house, medieval and moated, and of William's elder brother Rich, a young man whose life itself was "moated in" - dominated and directed by his epilepsy - and it's about a sibling's place in a family whose heritage is all around them and whose personal history is marked by loss as well as love.

    Fiennes is such an observant, sensitive narrator. He is, here, the custodian of so many memories, and it is the texture of those remembered times, the layered details which shape and colour a moment, which his gift for language brings out. Lucid, restrained, accepting, tender - that's the mood of the piece, and it gives much to savour. If you're drawn to contemplative writing and to understated poignancy, then this essentially sad but ultimately uplifting book should touch and impress you, and will undoubtedly make you think.