Between Each Breath

Jack Middleton, the central character, is a composer of classical modern music. Mentally, and sometimes physically, he translates every auditory experience and many a visual one into a score. He comes from a humble suburban background, but has married into a wealthy gentry family and is very much in love with his wife Milly. A number of composers have been commissioned, for the opening of London's Millennium Dome, to write pieces celebrating various countries of Europe. In his case it is Estonia. Already an admirer of Arvo Part's music, he travels out there for further inspiration. During his brief stay there he has `a fling' with a girl called Kaja. Then he returns to the bosom of his family.Six years later, that affaire catches up on him when Kaja turns up in England, and the principal theme of the book is about the dilemma this causes him. Some of the reviews have described Jack as a weak personality, which is one way of accounting for his unpleasantly deceitful character. Of course one can feel sorry even for a deceitful character, and this is a tragedy, even if laced with humour as Jack wriggles in the situation in which he is trapped. Jack himself is a bit of a humourist: Thorpe gives him lots of wisecracks (some of which are signs of his evading an honest response).A subplot deals with Jack's touching relationship to his elderly parents, which actually I found the most affecting part of the book.Through Thorpe's (and Jack's) eyes we see a vulgar and materialistic England, to which the simplicity of Estonia in the early years after liberation is a counterpoint. He also gives some satirical descriptions of the landed gentry and of the inhabitants of Hampstead where the Middletons have made their home.Thorpe is also a poet, and the text is full of symbolism, metaphors and analogies; but some of them seem to me forced and irritating. For example, at the top of one page we have the following: "The Guardian nosed its way through the letter box and hung there, thick as a loin of venison", and at the bottom of the same page Jack is "walking past the boutiques and their knobbly wall of music [,] the equivalent of having a sharp stick run along his ribs". This sort of language contrasts with some naturalistic but ugly demotic speech.The book is set in the late 1990s. If it is still in print twenty years from now, many of the references to the England of those years would need footnotes.

This is both heartbreaking and unsettling. extremely well written, and hard to put down. You know the end at the beginning, but is it really the end that you expect? A very good read.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is the way I was impelled through this book, despite the selfish, self-centred and careless behaviour of the main character. I found fascinating the way he heard music in everything surrounding his life. Jack's situation so thoroughly explored and evoked, as was his world and those who inhabited it, that the book felt heavy in import, even though the language used to tell it was so accurately applied as to be featherlight.

I was getting annoyed at the beginning both by the apparent incongruence of the prologue and then by the lengthy description of an idle class of willing artists, mature snobs, and a young resolute but inconsistent radical militant of her own personal cause, Milly, the would be mother of her lost child and of all the children of the world, except for her husband's one!As narration progesses, you find out that there is much more to it than just a frustrated composer who has an occasional story with an acquaintance on one of his business trips abroad. The protagonist is a social climber, and he thinks he is satisfied with it. In fact he is not. A series of events brings him back closer to his real buried self, he comes to terms with his relation to his mother, gets back to his father with humility and humanity, finds out about that fatherhood he had not accomplished,overwhelmed as he is by his wife's obsessive sense of motherhood.When the composer gets back to his inner self, gets in touch with his deepest truest feelings, his creativity reveals itself, his music will flourish again and, above all, his most significant creation, his child, helps him find a renovated and more sensible meaning of life.

Well worth reading for its perceptive descriptions of subjectivity and inter subjectivity and the difficulty of surviving in the world with integrity

Adam Thorpe is quite the all-rounder, and here he brings us a beautifully worked exploration of the compromises forced upon a middle-aged married composer when he falls in love with an Estonian waitress. The culture shock forces the (English) reader to question himself.