Music and Silence I bought for its title in 1980. A ticket to Talking Heads in Radio City Music Hall, Sunday Nov O2 1980, was left between the pages. Anne Redmon, the author, is not available on google except for a few copies of her books from the usual sources. One Kirkus Review about a promising writer in 1978. Somewhere I found a photo of a large, smiling woman, and could see her in a shabby but warm flat near Victoria, which is where much of the novel is set.
The novel is a women's two-hander, one Music and the other, Silence, with a lurking religious fanatic, a maestro of the cello and his handsome wife and a couple of other small male parts, plus Italian and Spanish outreach and social chill. Duty, patience, not quite regret. Polite disquiet. Walking into your plot with your umbrella furled. There are alternating chapters, silence then music, with the religious fanatic waiting in the wings and the cello maestro, Alba, listening to music and occasionally playing.
This time, Alba sat back and well and truly listened. I cannot describe how he did this—I only know that the effect was extraordinary. It was as if his ear was firmly braced down under me; it was as if all my life I had been a trapeze dancer without a net; he spread his consciousness low to catch me.
The music pages sang. The structure ached a bit, like an old bed in Casa Grande, Portugal, the Blue Room. The ending will have to be surprising and hence not surprising at all. The novel travels on her own two feet.
I prefer dreams, which are inconsequential and relentless. It all turns on a blush and a pile of photographs, a tumble drier and a coffee cup left in a broken wall at the bottom of the hill. You wake up and bask all over again.
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