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I have to tell you, before you read any further, that I know Martha Toll. I’m also in awe of her writing, so I have no qualms about talking you into trying out her second published novel.

 

Duet for One, as you have probably guessed from the title, features music and musicians. You possibly already know Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. Martha quotes his book at the start of hers. Duet for One, like An Equal Music, is a book that strives to live the life of classical musicians, to convey how music pervades every inch of their being and to transfer that all-pervasiveness to the page. To put music on the page.

 

It is also a book about love in its many forms: love, and grief (which is a form of love) and how love can get lost in the labyrinth between people, the labyrinth of the failure to communicate. Because Duet for One is not only about music. It’s about words and their power to uplift or to condemn. It’s about how words can linger in the mind and resurface year after year, training the brain to reinforce an emotion that may, or may not, have been a reasonable reaction in the first place. It’s about the struggle to recognise that you can start again; that you can be aware of your past and you can flourish despite it. Or alongside it.

 

I’m sure the author’s choice to have one of her characters an academic specialising in English Literature, as well as being a talented musician, is a deliberate pointer that words are important. Some musicians in the book fail to communicate, for example by saying too little or by not voicing pride in a child’s achievements. Others devastate with their words. Words can be abusive, we all know that, because they connect directly to emotions and that clever brain of ours ceases to be clever and obsesses the emotion into something life threatening.

 

On the other hand some of Martha’s musician characters use words to bring out the best in other people.

 

One of these is Isaac Koroff, tutor to one of the three point of view characters, Dara Kingsley. In her notes at the end of the book Martha tells you that Koroff is based on her own viola teacher. And what a lovely man he is. So lovely that viola-playing Dara finds it impossible to regain her equilibrium when he dies.

 

Adam Pearl, one of the other main characters, had no such luck with his mother. Adam can only remember communicating with his mother through music. Which was wonderful and special, but he needed those words.

 

That Adam’s mother did love him dearly comes out through the eyes of his father, when he goes through his wife’s scrapbooks after her death. Victor Pearl is the third point of view in the book.

 

And that beautiful writing I started this little essay with? Let me tell you that this wasn’t the first book I pulled from my shelf for this month. I put that book aside. It no longer resonated with me. I gave it to the Little Free Library. It wasn’t a bad book. I just no longer liked it. Then I opened Martha’s and it was like opening a window to air a a stuffy room. Martha puts you cleanly in a place, gives you feelings of love, grief, and anxiety, and she evokes the power of music.

 

This is how Duet for One begins:

 

“Adele Pearl was dead, vanquished by ovarian cancer. Adam and Victor shivered at her graveside.

            Adam was thirty-seven when his mother died. He was a violinist known for fluidity and grace.

            Victor was Adam’s father, the surviving half of Pearl and Pearl, a world-renowned two-piano team and joint piano faculty at Philadelphia’s Caldwell Institute of Music.

            Out of the corner of his eye, Adam watched Phillip Hissle hurry downhill. Hissle tripped, then bent to pick up his fedora from the damp, muddy ground. Instinctively, Adam moved closer to his father, although Hissle was too far away to create a disturbance.

            For the small knot of mourners, time paused and music slept.

            For Victor, Adele’s death was a black hole that sucked in music.

For Adam, a numbness.”

 

This paragraph is packed full of information and foreshadowing but what you will feel, what you will take with you into the next paragraph, is the feelings evoked by words like fluidity, grace, surviving, vanquished, slept and sucked in. All that other world building, that establishing of place and profession, will make you feel safe as you go forward, but it is those emotions created by words that you will carry into discovering more about Adam and Victor.

 

And I hope you do go forward because this is a tightly written  book. It is deceptively simple in its structure and not long, only 200 pages, but layered with motifs and themes and a distinct tune for each character. Like a piece of music.

 

And if you haven’t read An Equal Music, I can recommend that too.