The Novels of Norman Lebrecht

i'm joined today by the writer and critic norman lebrecht norman of course is extremely well known for writing about music and musicians and the music industry we're going to be talking to him today about his novels the song of names and the game of opposites norman thank you for joining us pleasure norman's first novel the song of names was published in 2002 and won the prestigious whitbread first novel award it's basically a story of two boys growing up together in wartime london one is a genius a violinist of extraordinary ability and the other is not

um he but he's the kind of symbiotic other half uh without whom the violinist can't function it's so in a sense it's it's it's a novel about the functioning of music because music cannot exist without people of extraordinary ability and imagination but it also can't exist without people of mundanity and practicality and so the story is basically of this genius growing up in in london during the war who disappears on the day of his debut and in disappearing takes away half the life of as it were his symbiotic other half and the song of names

is the thing that pulls them apart and that brings them together again or that may bring them together again um in the course of the novel the central character is or one of the two central characters is davidil the uh the genius prodigy he's presented as as both compelling to audiences and to individuals but he also has this deeply repugnant side to him and there's a great quote that i'd i'd like to read out and it's by um it's said by the father of martin the the other boy and he says faced with a choice

between saving the human race and having fluffy towels in their dressing room they will always go for the towels you're writing here as a novelist of course but um it's impossible to ignore the fact that you're extremely familiar with the world of classical music and i wonder if actually you think that that's an intrinsic part of what it is to be a successful soloist that you have to constantly tread this line and live this paradoxical life of being hugely attractive and compelling to a very large number of people but in order to do so you

need uh to be quite unpleasantly self-serving to a degree yes nobody succeeds at anything without an a measure of self-interest and detachment and if necessary carelessness and cruelty graham green whom i have the privilege of knowing said famously uh there are no great writers without a sliver of ice in the heart um you do so in in art and creation you express a great deal of warmth you conjure up a great deal of emotion but at the heart of it there is always a line of vision a detached line of vision which sets you apart

from what's going on around you and which can um recoil against those who are closest to you and that the line that you quoted from from martin's father the impresario talking about the artists whom he adores and who are the basis of his living um and and who occupy all of his waking thoughts and at the same time he there is a part of him that holds them in contempt because he can see that there is a part of them that holds him in contempt and that's that's the nature of the relationship between the artists

and the world and particularly between the artists and those who engage them with the world and it that's one of the themes that i try to explore in the novel having observed managers agents orchestral directors good bad indifferent very few outstanding over a very long period of observing and writing about music there is this um very entertaining line of mutual contempt that comes out over the second drink and it may not be genuine i mean that's the beautiful thing in fiction it you can say it but it doesn't necessarily have to be what they really

feel it can be what just comes out over the second drink and that is an adjustment that's a correction that's a way of them coping with the feelings of humiliation they suffer at the hands of their artists is there a sense in which uh your first novel is supposed to be slightly autobiographical is this why it's a musical novel um not really it's not autobiographical i mean there may be bits of me but if that's that's why the autobiography lies because in in my professional life i tried to detach it from from what i did

professionally but it was a sort of it was a way of getting away from all of that you know i'd sort of done enough of that i've written 12 books about music um i know how to write a non-fiction book you go out you do your research you have a structure you sit down and and you write it and if at any point in the in the writing of it you find that you're blocked it means you haven't done enough research so you go out again yeah and and that becomes a kind of formula for

writing with fiction it's completely different because the the characters take over and you are at their mercy and you actually have to relearn everything that you've done about writing so i didn't really want my other life to intrude into it but some of the subject matter came into it yeah and and i couldn't really escape that and then once it did then i suppose one was able to share through through the protagonists some of the things that one has wanted observed one of the other main themes and areas that you write about is is of

jewishness and of judaism and and particularly how they relate to davidil and in a sense he embodies one of the the great 20th century symbols of of sympathy he's a he's a child he's he's a polish refugee he's jewish his family have all been killed in the holocaust but on the other hand he is um he's incredibly self-serving and he'll use people and discard them when they're they're no longer of any value to him i mean one sense he's like any of us he's trying to find his place in the world he's been blessed with

a gift he's been afflicted by the history of the 20th century uh so he is both hero and victim and some way out of that he has to try and find for himself a resolution with his identities because there are several as a human being as an artist as a jew as a polish jew as an english boy in an english school all of those things more than anything he needs to find something that will validate his existence and the question there is is it enough to play the violin and i suppose the other question

that lies in the heart of it is how do we cope with individuals of extraordinary ability how do we cope with them within the family how do we cope with them as friends how do we cover them as partners in business and so forth what is the language that we have to use in order to engage with people who whose other life the ordinary person has no idea one of the characters that you introduce a real-life character one of several real-life characters including yourself you've given it away is is joseph hasid yosef hasid who i

confess is it was a new name to me um he his life clearly has some parallels with uh the life of davido although differs in some key respects um could you uh just tell us a little about joseph hasid well he was a polish violinist like david older than doctor he came to london to study with carl flesch who lived up the road there in west hampstead um and uh along with eda handel and jeanette never and various other famous violinists um and he uh um he suffered mental illness um and he uh was put

into uh a mental home he they finally they they subjected him to a lobotomy and he died there um in the 1940s um it was a tragic loss of an outstanding talent i mean everybody either handle is probably the last person of life in europe speaks of him as as one of the one of the untouchables um but somebody whose life was was plagued by um my illness but in a sense the way that that that as it were biography autobiography personal acquaintance intrudes upon the novel when the novel was finished when it was published

when it won the award when it was all you know all there and talked about um a photographer called david farrell who works with my wife um came around and asked to see me and said you know how did you know about the carl flesch classes i said well i've heard about it from very so well i was i was i played the violin as a boy and he let me sit in on his classes and uh i i knew joseph i said i said he said yes we used to uh during the blitz we

would go together two boys and go down to some johnswood underground station and sit there on the platform and sleep there overnight so the reality intrudes on on the fiction that i created i want to ask you about another quote which is possibly my favorite quote of the of the novel and it's by davidil himself who misses his grand debut in london which is meant to launch his career um and years later martin goes and finds him and says you what happened and um and davidil said this i was made out to be the best

violinist since chrysler but i did not feel that way i knew that others would discover sooner or later what i already knew that my reputation was many times greater than my ability i was born with a curse of an intelligence larger than my talent and i think this is a wonderful quote uh for anybody whose career isn't quite going to plan i i plan to use it frequently in the future but i wonder uh if you think um that actually this almost willful ignorance of your own failings is something that you need to push yourself

forward as a soloist or as a musician generally um or whether it's actually something that needs to be harnessed i'm thinking of people like monet and stanley kubrick who who who could doubt their talents hugely but then of course produced great work it's one of the most attractive facets of any human being and in an artist it's overwhelmingly attractive when you see someone for whom you have evidence that they are an outstanding artist from whom you have respect and affection and you see at the heart of it their own lack of belief their own need

for validation that what they are doing is important is different is essential um that's that's that's that's a compelling thing there are artists who are smitten with self-doubt because they're not intelligent enough to appreciate what it is they do and there are others who are smitten because they are too intelligent uh and and they can actually see the bigger picture and they wonder whether this small thing that i do is is that it yeah um and those are the great ones those are the great ones the others i mean there are plenty of others who

trundle along um believing the hype yeah are quite happy to come to every new town and be garlanded and celebrated until they're the greatest on earth and they will beam yeah and and and luxuriate and those are the uninteresting ones you're too young to have experienced the second world war but uh you set your novel in the second world war um you have first-hand experience of the other areas that you discuss judaism and jewishness london and of course music and the music industry why set the novel in a period of which you have no direct

experience again the answer is i don't know why did it have to be in that period i'm not sure i think it's probably to do with autobiography i was born in 1948. my sisters were all born in the 1930s and they raised me so i grew up with these teenage sisters who gave me the sense that i missed all the fun the war was when it all happened you know the war was when we got bombed we got evacuated we saw london bridge burning we did this we did that um and all i saw were

the empty bomb sites and so somewhere in my unconscious is this idea that i should have come along sooner um and then along with that my parents had been very active in refugee efforts during the 30s and the 40s and and even as i was growing up there was still a stream of people coming through the house and staying over because they have nowhere to go no because they were between countries or because they were just coming back to say thank you yeah so i i grew up with that sense of um unbelonging and fluidity

and transience and and the chanceness of life um which all stems from the 1930s they had the period the war and the idea that people were really fighting for survival they weren't finding better living conditions or struggling for survival it wasn't for better living conditions it wasn't for another bathroom it was a matter of life and death um somewhere within me there is a sense that i missed out one of the characters in in the novel is inanimate which is the violin um davido is lent quite early on a guadagnini a beautiful guadagnini violin which

it comes to symbolize many things i think in a i'm tempted to say in a in a ring-like way whether that's wagnerian or tolkienesque is it could be either um it lends the owner great power and and happiness but there's also a sense of liberation when it's taken back or it's lost it's about what it means to have a real relationship and to lose it um and then to question every other relationship and to pose every other beside that as for its inadequacy set beside that the violinist and the instrument and you have a kind

of artificial paradigm of non-relationship in no other form of art is there a bond so strong as that between a violinist and the instrument it possibly exists with viola players and cellists they may tell you but i don't think it's so i think it's just violence no pianist feels for his piano as a violinist for his violin no person on any other instrument no artist for his brush no writer for his pen or hers the violin violinist bond is unique in music because the violinist imagines that only through this particular instrument only through this particular

tool can he or she find expression and the tool itself is then so connected with the player that it's named after the player for all time to come so that a a that was played by vietnam is still vietnam who died in the late 19th century is still to this day known as the vietnam stradivarius the chrysler and the isi and so forth um is that a real relationship no it isn't it's it's a kind it sort of mocks the real relationship it's the place in which the violinist can retreat because it's the substitute yes

it's not you know it's not the plastic doll it's nothing of the salt i mean it's it's it is a a valued relationship of a very different kind but it is a place where the highly strong violinist and i use the adjective advisedly can retreat into a place of quiet knowing that the fidelity is absolute knowing this is a relationship unlike any other it cannot be breached yeah but is there not a sense that you have to be if you've got such a wonderful violin you have to be equal to that violin um and they

thought yes yes yes yes yes and therefore it's also an expression of your own of your own inadequacy yeah you know who's played this violin before you the pivotal moment in the book occurs when davido hears the eponymous song of names which changes his whole outlook on life and music song of names appears in the novel as a means of memorializing the dead and it's to the best of my research it has never existed even though various people have come up to me and told me that they'd heard of it they knew of it but

i haven't been able to validate it in any way one of the primary duties in judaism actually probably the the highest duty of all is to bury the dead and mourn the dead remember them the first thing that jews do when they set up a new community when they move into a new place is buy land for a cemetery before they have a synagogue before they have a school before they have anything else first thing you do abraham did it in the bible first thing you do you buy land for a cemetery taking care of

the dead is the highest priority so during the holocaust when people were dying in droves uh and and many of them without families because their families had died already there was no actual way of remembering them and what i bring in is is a hasidic rabbi who finds a way of remembering him who tells his followers go out and everyone that you see today who has died everybody that you see on the street get a name bring me back a name and i will work out a way of remembering all of those names so that

when all of this is over should some of us survive we will be able to find their relatives who will memorialize them in the kurdish prayer but we will conserve the names even as they try to wipe them out and the way of doing that was by theme and variations yeah many of the hasidic rivers work in poses in fact the whole of hasidic judaism starts with this idea of rejoicing in god rather than worshiping god and the way of rejoicing especially for people who were simple and in many cases illiterate was to give voice

to a song so the rebels were composers and much of what they composed was done on a theme and variations principle it's it's i think i mentioned in in the novel that the founder of hacidism um the belchentov was actually born in the same year as joan sebastian bach a contemporaries so the the the theme and variations uh between what he does in the goldberg variations there are affinities there and so it is possible actually to store hundreds thousands of names in a tune with variations that these rivers would impose and again once i finished

a novel i happened to be sitting with the friend of with friends whose father was over and he was singing something at the table he was a crack voice he was known in his ages i said what's that you're saying he said oh you wouldn't know he said um tell me um he said oh it was something i learned you know as a child from the river i said this really interests me because i'm the means of transmission between the rubbers who by the end of the 19th century muslim lived deep in the country in

poland and russia and their followers lived in cities um how did the new tunes get transmitted from where the rubber lived 500 kilometers away to where their for followers had a community what was the means of transmission he said you're looking at it it was me i said i was like when i was a boy i had a good ear and i had a good voice and people clubbed together and they bought a train ticket and i went out and um would spend a week with the rapper listening to all the new songs and then

i would bring them back and i would sing them to the others and we would all have them i said how did you do that he said he said it was simple there would be a tune it would go like this and there would be another tune and it would go like this and then the first tune would slightly change and then the second tune was slightly changed and then they would combine and then there would be uh the the combination would bring a slight change to the right a slight change to the left what

i'm listening to is theme of variations yeah and he was actually saying and it went in fours the 28s it went in 16s in 2032 to 1964. the mnemonic power of music the ability of music to store information and to implant it in ways that cannot be erased um yes that's that's one of the things that finds its way into the novel suddenly in the context of the novel music has a much more functional role it becomes a tool for recording for remembrance um and for remembering suddenly totally subsumed under its religious and social context

do you think there's a sense in which we've made the world of concert music in a sense so hermetically sealed and de-contextualized that as musicians we find it hard to to make sense of that is this really about david just trying to find sense in what it is he's doing absolutely yeah yes it's about finding meaning in music and finding the purpose of music and uh in a way that in the formalized structures that we have for presenting music we often lose because we're over trained you know anybody who gets up under a concert platform

these days is wildly over trained in comparison to anybody who did that 50 years ago or 100 years ago let alone 200 years ago so they've lost the the organic sense of making music just to make music they're there to make music as a living as a profession as a vocation um but there have been so many strictures that have been drummed into them along the way from their first days at music school right the way through to the day they got accepted in an orchestra or they became a soloist or conductor or whatever that

uh the impulse has become hidden away at the heart of it and the honest ones still continue to look for the impulse yeah many of the others don't bother i want to talk a little bit before we talk about your second novel about the whole process of writing fiction you write about music and you write in a non-fictional sense and you write about musicians and the music industry i wonder is there a different process in the way that you conceive a novel about music from the way you conceive a a book about music completely different

completely different when you're writing a documentary book um you have a grid and you know you have a beginning a middle and then you and and you know roughly along the path that you're going with with the novel the first thing that you discover is the characters once you've set the characters on paper um they get on with it you don't you know you've you've placed two four six eight individuals with certain um pre-ordained characteristics yeah and then you you just sit back back and see how they interact and see what they make of the

situation that they found themselves in so it's as as a writer you're fairly helpless in that situation you can tweak a bit you can tune a bit um but if you try to direct them if you try to push them down some pre-ordained conclusion you're going to create a false and very bad novel so you don't do it you learn early on that it's an ally to reprocess um and i can honestly say that i didn't know how the novel was going to end until the morning that it ended your second novel the game of

opposites published in 2009 is in many ways a very different novel but with a certain element of overlap it's set in wartime or i should say immediately after war perhaps again could you just tell us a little bit about what the novel is about it's about a man who is thrown into a slave camp during a war um who every day marches the death march to the quarry from which many don't return and at the end of the war he goes to live in the village next to the death camp through which he and his

friends had trapped the march every day now why would anybody do that and did anybody do that um actually yes one his testimonies of people who did why again it's about people it's about how relationships are born and how they're formed and how they develop it's about how um about whether whether trauma can ever be healed or whether we can merely patch it over and put vaseline on it um it's about some of those big questions but it's also a love story or several love stories um it's about it's about fear what it's not about

unlike the song of names is ambition it's not about ambition all the ambition comes into it but it's not it's it's not about somebody who is destined for greatness or who wants to achieve a particular thing in life it's about somebody who's blown about by life and tries to find his way through it one of the things that i find fascinating about this novel is that you very deliberately i'm i'm assuming withhold information from the reader so you you can make an educated guess about which war it is um but you never explicitly say it

is you don't say which country it's set in um and you don't explicitly say what any of the nationalities are um or the religions and again you can make i think produce dude guesses um and i know writers and composers don't like to be compared to other writers and composers but there was something very i felt kafkaesque about this not in the sense of overbearing bureaucracy and all that but more um it reminded me a bit of the castle where um we don't know what where the castle is you don't really know why the surveyor

is going there what's in the castle why he can't get there and what surrounds it and it um and that in itself you don't know why he can't leave there either in it and it creates a sense of really overbearing claustrophobia i don't think kafka's a primary influence i read him in my teens i don't think i've returned to him since and one i i suppose you assimilate that sort of thing um he wasn't in my mind as i was writing it i think what i didn't want it to be specific to any particular war

or any particular oppression because there are certain common features that all such impressions have in modern times um and i didn't want it to make i didn't want it to be the the i didn't want to i didn't want it to be harnessed to to any particular historical story although probably it's pretty clear what it is and where it is um paul is a piece of flotsam if there hadn't been a war he would somehow have blundered into a relationship a marriage and stayed in the same town where he was born made a living somehow

and possibly had some children and died but that didn't happen so he's blown around and he doesn't have the means with which to um to re reinvent himself because there isn't that much to reinvent he's not um a hugely um well-formed person he's a person that accrues characteristics and and and and information and tastes and as he goes along he's to some extent a piece of blotting paper maybe most of us are so when someone like that becomes a victim of great trauma you really want to see how not just how he's going to cope

with trauma you do it but it's the aftermath of trauma that's interesting how does somebody who has not been equipped for what he's been through then address the aftermath yeah i don't think i withhold any information about his background we know who he is we know what he's studied we know that that uh done architecture even though his parents wanted him to do medicine so he has he has those two contrasting disciplines not which are not just disciplines they're also um they're philosophies that he has assimilated so they've given him certain tools with which to

handle his situation his situation but then he has to handle it himself he has somehow to come to terms with who he is and where he's going to be and why does he not go any further than the next village yeah is there nowhere else that he can go is there nowhere else that he wants to go or is it that by staying in the village that the only way he can deal with what he's been through is by starting right there is also a sense that without the war he wouldn't be a particularly interesting

person absolutely michael yeah absolutely absolutely it's made him interesting to others it hasn't made him interesting to himself yeah the novel explores this idea of things that initially appear to be opposite um but which actually are seen to be obversized of the same coin and this is encapsulated in the in the eponymous game of opposites how does this work and and what's its relevance for your novel um it's what they call in the film world the macguffin it's the hinge upon which the novel turns um the way in which paul starts to find his way

out of the village or if you like out of the cell of the village that that in which he's enclosed his mind is by seeing things differently from the common cliche so if by by addressing this game of opposites and by saying that things are not obvious that's a kind of healing for him and it's a healing that he's then able to expand with the help of probably the most unorthodox psychoanalyst you've ever come across yeah you know in simple terms what is the opposite of black white but it isn't it can't be because black

is not a color and white white is a nothingness white is a nothingness and black is is something without they're both without color so the opposite of black white has more in common with black than it has with any other shade yeah therefore the opposite of black can't be white if it's not white what is it it's non-black what's non-black it's grey so the clearest example that you have of this is um when the doctor says what's the opposite of love and after much tune and throne it turns out that the opposite of love is

death and um which is to say it's not hate that's not hate so uh no because love and hate are two very strong emotions that are practically identical in many ways and of course that's totally encapsulated in the in the relationship paul has with his nemesis hans who is the former camp commandant who he eventually meets um and it turns out that he's obviously seeking revenge he wants to to kill him for what he did but it doesn't turn out to be that simple what is it about that relationship that makes it not so straightforward

it's the question that every survivor asks why did i survive why me and not others what did i have to do in order to survive did i have to be like them in order to survive did i have to actually lose part of myself sacrifice part of myself did i uh was i in any way a victim of stockholm syndrome that i was identifying with the oppressors rather than with my fellow sufferers that's the essence of survivor guilt yeah and for paul to deal with hunts to deal with the arch oppressor to deal with the

the acme of evil means delving into himself to see was there anything in him that was like hunts or even worse was there anything in hunts that was like him and those discoveries are are the most horrific things that he has to deal with we come across this also in the character of the professor who was also a former camp inmate um and who has subsequently become a kind of mafio so um black market entrepreneur um but has also set about uh taking revenge on on people who ran the camps um and he says he

gives up after a while and he says one killing is much the same as another and organizing them is a logistical headache which and that's very much that same sense isn't that actually if you want to take revenge on on something as big as as a war camp you have to become organized and to become organized you you dehumanize the people you become them you become them you become them and then you've lost your whole purpose in life yeah and so that's that's the struggle how how how to handle them without being them and how

to handle the memory of them and how to build a world without those aspects of them yeah either in those around you or particularly in yourself how to exercise those things that you've experienced yeah at the end of the novel you have a character ed who is a wartime american soldier who was involved in the liberation of the camp and then he has some parallels with martin in your previous novel in that he is somebody who's come totally under the spell of paul and has grown old and has now returned to the village to to

expiate himself of this spirit and while he's in the village he as an old man he rediscovers paul's psychiatrist's notes paul says to the psychiatrist i know who i am when i'm unloved and the psychiatrist says or asks unloved by whom paul and paul says by me by myself um and i i want to ask whether you think that having a relationship with somebody else inevitably implies a sort of some sort of reduction of yourself yes it does but it's also about how we are healed if we've suffered a great wound at any time in

our lives if we've suffered a bereavement as a child or we've been through a war or we've been through prison or camps or any of those things what is our capacity to heal ourselves and what is a what is the capacity of civilization be it medicine be it psychotherapy uh be it culture to patch that wound yeah to enable us to carry on and those those are some of the questions that i'd like to ask um the issues that arise for paul with his analyst who is not an analyst who is who is the student

of somebody that freud threw out in other words who is an iconic class of iconoclasts but who has himself been through trauma not a double negative it may well be it may well be it may well be um and that that's that really just tries to delve upon and to touch those questions and and they are ultimately unfathomable um i'm fascinated by the personality of the french singer songwriter barbara made a documentary about her a couple of years ago she is um jewish born in france in 1930 was in hiding during the occupation years was

raped by her father was actually physically wounded by him as well and carried those traumas with her through life um and the evidence is grueling and appalling and in the course of uh the program i asked a child psychiatrist in paris who deals with many such cases as to whether there is a healing whether one can be healed and she said no one can adapt one can adjust one finds a way of getting on with life but you are never you do never recover from these things in the case of baba it was the songs

that she wrote and she sang it was the love affair that she had with her audience um that enabled her to transcend the horror and the hurt in paul's case it's the beginnings of an understanding and it's it's the physical revenge that he wreaks upon his surroundings um these these things together the self-understanding and the way in which he's transformed the landscape those are the coping mechanisms does he heal does he recover no no one does if you'd like more information about norman's novels please visit this link if you'd like to be notified when norman's

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