Amazon.com Review
Barbara Trapido's golden novel about loss is an
Alice in Wonderland for grownups. From its haunting start--"Early on in the morning of my interview, I woke up and saw my dead sister"--to its final, endless irony,
The Travelling Hornplayer zips with plot twists and character turns, shocking revelations and desperate reactions. Any attempt at summary is dizzying, but here are a few hints: for three years, Ellen Dent has been devastated by the loss of her younger sister, who had struck famous novelist Jonathan Goldman as having "the pleasing air of one who plans to easily pass through this life, collecting admirers at tennis parties." Nonetheless, Lydia's charmed teenage existence had come to a quick end, courtesy of a car, outside Jonathan's North London flat after his daughter, Stella, turned her away, mistaking her for his mistress, Sonia. Sonia herself will later crop up in the Cotswolds as the temporary lodger of Jonathan's beloved wife--and I won't even begin to unravel Stella's super-disconcerting tale. I will, however, say that the book contains several other matchless, larger-than-life characters and strands, which mesh together into a sparky, tragicomic puzzle.
In Trapido's world all is not what it seems, to put it mildly. She is a gifted comic writer because she knows tragedy is just around every corner. Since 1982 and the publication of her Whitbread-winning novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, her buoyant, allusive roundelays have proved that she has a knack for the ways gifted families work--and the ways they most definitely do not. She is also a brilliant commingler of life and art. Her third novel, Temples of Delight, is an inventive riff on The Magic Flute, while her fourth, Juggling (inexplicably, never published in the U.S.), sets forth a key Trapidian tenet, the superiority of Shakespearean comedy over tragedy: "Survival is admirable. It is more difficult than death, since it takes more energy and guile." The Travelling Hornplayer seems to have been inspired by both Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Müller's lyrics, "which Schubert, under the cloud of his own recently diagnosed syphilis, managed so brilliantly to layer and elevate into a profound, bombarding symbiosis of love and death." This tantalizing novel is no less layered--though, given her comic genius, elevation isn't exactly Barbara Trapido's style. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
A deliciously subversive British novelist who deserves a wider American audience, Trapido (Brother of the More Famous Jack) delivers a clever story of a group of people?in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh?connected by the accidental death of a teenage schoolgirl. When Lydia Dent contacts novelist Jonathan Goldman to ask his help in writing an essay on the poems of German Romantic Wilhelm Muller (set to music by Schubert as Die schone Mullerin), she unwittingly sets in motion a complex tragicomedy of errors that eventually brings together star-crossed characters: Lydia's sister Ellen; Jonathan's daughter Stella, who is Ellen's friend at Edinburgh University; Izzy Tench, a scuzzy yet brilliant painter who fathers Stella's child; Peregrine (Pen) Massingham, whom Stella marries; Jonathan's wife, Katherine, who befriends Jonathan's lover, Sonia, who is patron to Izzy; Jonathan's brother Roger, who late in the story falls in love with Ellen. Their lives intersect within a net of intricate yet plausible coincidences that, remarkably, rarely seem to be mere exigency of plot. One is reminded of a Shakespearean play where all the players keep bumping into one another in the magical forest. Only toward the end of the novel do the coincidental meetings stretch credulity a bit too far, but by then readers are likely to be snugly entrapped by the plot's momentum. As Trapido's characters experience love, loss, grief and plucky survival, the narrative twists are accomplished with a sleight of hand so subtle that the reader is often stunned. Trapido's dry wit and acerbic observations, especially of Britain's class system, are consistently engaging. Her depiction of Pen's very Catholic, very parsimonious, aggressively athletic Scottish family is worth the price of the book alone.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
