Love, Loss, Music, and Alternate Realities - Part 2

Making music and making love - it's a bit too easy an equation.


And so it seems in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, another tale of love and loss entangled in a world of music. Sentimental and saccharine to a point of instilling diabetic coma in the reader, this book does have its moments. These are the sonic images of locations and the aural descriptions of making music that transport us into an another dimension. The story itself is ordinary - man in love with a ghost of his past, man finds ghost, rekindles old passions, gets burnt again. There are things that happen in between all that of course, but that is just the back beat. 


Seth does not provide run-of-the-mill descriptions for his characters - these are musicians in a quartet and a lot can be deduced from the instruments they play, their music and their individual reactions to a shared music.  As our Orpheus ponders: ..."ours is an odd quadripartite marriage with six relationships, any of which, at any given time, could be cordial or neutral or strained."


What the novel excels in is the meditation on the complexity of two profound loves: of music and of the beloved. Our narrator loses both at inopportune times - first his love through some unexplained form of behavior on his part, then his music at some concert. He is a calamity Jane of the high-strung type, but is somewhat redeemed because finally it is the music that counts. 


And it is this music that saves us all from the loss of love, to gather some semblance of living in our otherwise ruined worlds.