The Ghost Variations by Damian Lanigan review – the power of the piano | Fiction

Early in The Ghost Variations, the third novel by Damian Lanigan, the narrator approaches a woman in a bar to ask her a question: “Would you mind if I played the piano a little? I’ll be quiet. And I’ll be good. I’ll be quietly good.”

Quietly good: the phrase aptly describes this accomplished book about love, grief and the constraining and consoling effects of art. Declan Byrnie grew up in a family with Irish roots in working-class Manchester, but his prodigious gifts as a classical pianist transported him to a lavish world of concert halls and oligarchs’ homes. He was at the height of his fame when his wife, Esther, died in mysterious circumstances during a hiking trip; bereft, he disappeared from the music scene for four years. We meet Byrnie as he prepares for what, having been coaxed by his agent to perform again before adoring audiences and a prurient media, he sardonically calls the “Dead Wife Tour”.

Byrnie’s sense of loss suffuses his whole worldview. Now a New Yorker, he spends his evenings rotating between “four or five bars in Upper Manhattan with instruments I can use, a rust belt of these old machines, remnants of a world becoming derelict”. He tells an interviewer: “I think it’s obvious we’re close to losing all this stuff” – that is, the historical repertoire of piano music – “which would be a tragedy … We wouldn’t stand by if St Paul’s Cathedral were being dismantled before our eyes. If the Uffizi were on fire, someone would try to put it out.”

Initially, Byrnie attempts to douse the flames of his own loss through the simulacrum of intimacy offered by casual sex: “Women are curious about gifted men, and upon this fact I continue to rely.” Byrnie is no predator, and Lanigan undoubtedly intends us to view his protagonist’s erotic exploits through a tragic lens. But the descriptions of Byrnie’s sexual conquests occasionally cause the story to veer close to the derelict world of late 20th-century novels about male geniuses surrounded by nubile and sexually voracious young women. A long section describing Byrnie’s road trip with Elise, a woman 10 years his junior, would have benefited from less flesh – Elise spends most of her time in a bikini – and more fleshing out of character.

A myopic protagonist can be an asset to a novel: take The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro’s great work about a dementia-afflicted concert pianist, a clear influence here. In that book the reader is constantly aware of the distance between the narrator’s perceptions and the reality beyond them. But the occasional bum notes in Lanigan’s prose as he describes the endlessly available women around Byrnie – “her wet blue eyes, her mouth, pouty and mobile … I occasionally ascend into thoughts of its hot slitheriness” – made me wonder whether some of the myopia here belonged to the author and not just his character. By contrast, The Ghost Variations is usually pitch-perfect when it describes Byrnie’s enduring passion and the novel’s core theme: music. Lanigan writes eloquently about both the exhilaration and mundanity of a musician’s life, the euphoria of the audience’s applause and the “tedious, arduous, repetitive, ugly work” of practising. And he is convincing in his portrait of a man for whom the piano is both an obstacle to human contact (“the composers … never disappoint like real people”) and ultimately his means of redemption.

But it’s in the difficult work of translating the medium of music to that of prose that Lanigan most excels. A Chopin Berceuse sounds like “starlit water games”. Byrnie plans to play Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata with “an almost meditative expression, as if the music was resolved before it began, its end present in its beginning, so any sense of narrative or struggle would be needless”. Bach offers “a view of the cosmos as explicable and morally correct, constellations turning in rhythm over the imperfect world, a presiding power observing and forgiving”. As I read, I found myself reaching for my headphones to experience the pieces this novel describes so beautifully, the music enhanced by Lanigan’s words and vice versa.

Early in The Ghost Variations, the third novel by Damian Lanigan, the narrator approaches a woman in a bar to ask her a question: “Would you mind if I played the piano a little? I’ll be quiet. And I’ll be good. I’ll be quietly good.”

Quietly good: the phrase aptly describes this accomplished book about love, grief and the constraining and consoling effects of art. Declan Byrnie grew up in a family with Irish roots in working-class Manchester, but his prodigious gifts as a classical pianist transported him to a lavish world of concert halls and oligarchs’ homes. He was at the height of his fame when his wife, Esther, died in mysterious circumstances during a hiking trip; bereft, he disappeared from the music scene for four years. We meet Byrnie as he prepares for what, having been coaxed by his agent to perform again before adoring audiences and a prurient media, he sardonically calls the “Dead Wife Tour”.

Byrnie’s sense of loss suffuses his whole worldview. Now a New Yorker, he spends his evenings rotating between “four or five bars in Upper Manhattan with instruments I can use, a rust belt of these old machines, remnants of a world becoming derelict”. He tells an interviewer: “I think it’s obvious we’re close to losing all this stuff” – that is, the historical repertoire of piano music – “which would be a tragedy … We wouldn’t stand by if St Paul’s Cathedral were being dismantled before our eyes. If the Uffizi were on fire, someone would try to put it out.”

Initially, Byrnie attempts to douse the flames of his own loss through the simulacrum of intimacy offered by casual sex: “Women are curious about gifted men, and upon this fact I continue to rely.” Byrnie is no predator, and Lanigan undoubtedly intends us to view his protagonist’s erotic exploits through a tragic lens. But the descriptions of Byrnie’s sexual conquests occasionally cause the story to veer close to the derelict world of late 20th-century novels about male geniuses surrounded by nubile and sexually voracious young women. A long section describing Byrnie’s road trip with Elise, a woman 10 years his junior, would have benefited from less flesh – Elise spends most of her time in a bikini – and more fleshing out of character.

A myopic protagonist can be an asset to a novel: take The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro’s great work about a dementia-afflicted concert pianist, a clear influence here. In that book the reader is constantly aware of the distance between the narrator’s perceptions and the reality beyond them. But the occasional bum notes in Lanigan’s prose as he describes the endlessly available women around Byrnie – “her wet blue eyes, her mouth, pouty and mobile … I occasionally ascend into thoughts of its hot slitheriness” – made me wonder whether some of the myopia here belonged to the author and not just his character. By contrast, The Ghost Variations is usually pitch-perfect when it describes Byrnie’s enduring passion and the novel’s core theme: music. Lanigan writes eloquently about both the exhilaration and mundanity of a musician’s life, the euphoria of the audience’s applause and the “tedious, arduous, repetitive, ugly work” of practising. And he is convincing in his portrait of a man for whom the piano is both an obstacle to human contact (“the composers … never disappoint like real people”) and ultimately his means of redemption.

But it’s in the difficult work of translating the medium of music to that of prose that Lanigan most excels. A Chopin Berceuse sounds like “starlit water games”. Byrnie plans to play Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata with “an almost meditative expression, as if the music was resolved before it began, its end present in its beginning, so any sense of narrative or struggle would be needless”. Bach offers “a view of the cosmos as explicable and morally correct, constellations turning in rhythm over the imperfect world, a presiding power observing and forgiving”. As I read, I found myself reaching for my headphones to experience the pieces this novel describes so beautifully, the music enhanced by Lanigan’s words and vice versa.