An Ungrateful Instrument by Michael Meehan
About the author
Michael Meehan’s novels –The Salt of Broken Tears, Deception, Below the Styx and Stormy Weather – have been shortlisted for and won many awards and have also been published internationally. He is an Emeritus Professor at Deakin University and was for many years the chair of Adelaide Writers Week. He currently lives in Adelaide, South Australia.
Review
Beauty hangs on a knife-edge in this superb novel to be treasured. Carmel Bird, January 28, 2023. The Sydney Morning Herald
"There are those who say the shape of the viol looks to the deepest, the most hidden patterns of perfection in the universe." These words are spoken by an old luthier working in a cavern deep in a forest in 18th-century France, during the lead-up to the Revolution. Twelve sections detailing his progress on a particular viol are delicately woven like smoke or water through An Ungrateful Instrument. This entrancing novel is the fifth from Michael Meehan, whose first, The Salt of Broken Tears, won the NSW Premier's Award for fiction in 2000.
The lyrical narrator is a historical character, Charlotte-Elisabeth Forqueray, elder sister of Jean-Baptiste, daughter of Antoine Forqueray. Father and son were both child prodigy musicians at the court of Louis XIV. Scenes of splendour at Versailles are dramatically undercut by visions of dark torment and graceless filth in the private lives of the Forquerays.
Prodigy comes at a terrible price. The savage violence of the composer-musician father towards wife, son, and daughter looks demonic. The text does not overtly play with the words "viol" and "violent", but they can hum together in the reader's ear.
An atmosphere of dread pervades the narrative, with the myth of Saturn eating his newborn children underpinning everything. Jupiter, the son who was not swallowed, rose to overthrow his father. And Jupiter is the title of one of the most well-known Forqueray pieces. Father and son worked together in savage misery on composition and performance, the father insisting there should be no manuscripts. A sad irony is that today the internet offers the scores of the music for free.
Adult Charlotte-Elisabeth opens the tale with the beguiling simplicity of "I want to tell a story". She soon reveals that she has been mute since the age of seven when her father viciously punished her for her inability to play the viol. He tore out her hair, beat her with the viol, locked her away for days with only bread and water. "I did not speak again." She becomes as "a shadow on a curtain", "a curtain moving in the wind".
She composes the story even as the luthier constructs the viol. Her muteness, ironic in an account of musical glory, is compelling, taking readers from inside the horrific lives of the characters to a place of soaring creativity. Destruction and creation play constantly against each other, while readers are kept on a knife edge of foreboding.
Charlotte-Elisabeth's story moves along with elegance and harmony, on several levels of metaphor, back and forth in time, while gradually unfolding a murky stream of what today is known as trauma. The father, forever calling on a flock of lawyers who flow "like dark and aromatic smoke", first has the son imprisoned and then exiled. He lusts after his daughter-in-law, harpsichordist Marie-Rose Dupois.
The luthier, himself an outcast from the court, a man who served as a slave on galley ships, gives meticulous detail on the building of the viol, as well as murmuring lyric words of wisdom. Beginning in the forest, the tree becomes the wood, becomes the instrument, becomes, with human agency, the music.
But the father brutally tells the son "Read the music in my eyes. There you will see the music. No score. No script. No tablature. My eyes."
Against this, listen as the luthier speaks of his creations: "Shapes that respond in beauty to the kindness and the care that I have placed in them. Things which serve the creating life in others." He has the final words of Charlotte-Elisabeth's story, telling Jean-Baptiste the viol is now ready for his music. "Make it your voice. Let it sing for you and only for you. Take it, and play."
The question embedded in the narrative is: will Jean-Baptiste become his father's "grateful and submissive instrument?" On one level the author emblazons the truths of violence within the family; on another he explores the wellsprings of creativity; on another he displays a society moving towards monstrous upheaval; on another he tenderly presents the character of a woman who has not spoken since she was a child. He does all this and more with immense skill and verve, presenting readers with a superb novel to be treasured.