The Variations

The wonderful latest from Langley (Arkady) tells the story of a British avant-garde composer, semi-estranged from her family and friends, who dies while walking in a snowstorm in Cornwall. Selda Heddle is found clutching her cherished bell, made for her by her former friend Ellen Montague. Ellen narrates the first part of the novel, which takes place shortly after Selda’s death in the present day at Agnes’s Hospice for the Acoustically Gifted, where she and Selda were wards in the late 1950s, and where Ellen is now dean. The “acoustically gifted” are not merely musical prodigies. Their “gift” allows them to hear the voices of their dead ancestors, an experience that can produce a state of distress easily mistaken for insanity. It is in such a mysterious and alarming condition that Wolf, Selda’s grandson, appears on the doorstep of the hospice, demanding a lobotomy and singing Selda’s masterpiece “Snow Trio.” In the wake of this dramatic entrance appears Anya, Wolf’s mother and Selda’s daughter. With her arrival, the story of four generations of “gifted” individuals unfolds, taking readers from WWII to the present, from Selda’s birth to her death. Langley is a mesmerizing guide to Selda’s music and the fantastical world of the hospice, a “variously demonized, patronized, scorned, venerated, vilified, and today largely ignored and near-bankrupted institution.” This is exquisite. (Feb.)