Book Review: The Instrument Must Not Matter makes its own kind of music

Article content

“Where words fail, sounds can often speak,” Hans Christian Andersen writes in What the Moon Saw, and he knew a thing or two about how to infiltrate the unconscious mind.

Article content

The sounds of music especially can be a powerful shortcut to that secret solitary place where our deepest self lurks, only one bittersweet love song away from opening a vein.

Article content

Article content

Musicians can make you cry on cue, but, sentimentality aside, more respectable emotions rarely exist in a vacuum, so just exactly what are we crying about? What does it mean to strike a chord?

Article content

Article content

Novelists intuit what musicians exploit — there’s always a story.

Article content

And sometimes words make their own special kind of music. Toronto journalist and author Christine Fischer Guy’s exquisitely rendered sophomore novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter, not only sings, it also plays the piano.

Article content

Article content

Article content

The Instrument Must Not Matter
Christine Fischer Guy
Buckrider Books: Wolsak & Wynn

Article content

Article content

Lila Rys, a musical prodigy and synesthete has just arrived in current-day New York City from her hometown of Toronto, to study with an elite piano instructor George Vrubel, who only accepts one pupil a year. A cranky old guy with onion breath who expects his students to do as they’re told, he’s met his match in eccentric socially inept Lila, a cranky 21-year-old who “stares too much, smiles too little,” who experienced “blinding white rages as a child,” and whose massive musical talent is exceeded only by her inability to do what’s she told.

Article content

So, that goes well.

Article content

Lila’s also navigating the male-centric world of classical music, where women are still expected to perform in dresses while dodging the leers of aging predators who wield power and influence like an unwanted pinch on the ass. She’s also torn between two lovers, the attentive Henrik Thomas, a rising composer, and the galvanizing Sofia Perez, a free-spirited concert pianist who wears pants on stage and encourages Lila to prioritize idiosyncrasy over convention.

Article content

Article content

Her desire to walk out Vrubel’s door and never come back is fraught — her agent projecting career suicide, even as Lila must reckon with her family’s sacrifices in service of her talent. They are counting on her to stay the course — her twin brother relying on her support as he pursues a future in academia, her mother and uncle viewing her professional promise as the culmination of a dream once held by her grandmother, a gifted violinist whose own career track was demolished decades earlier during the Prague Spring, in the aftermath of crackdowns on freedom.

Article content

Tasked with honouring her grandmother and restoring the family’s claim on music, Lila experiments with different playing techniques, while struggling against the ponderous weight of a history that both encumbers and fuels her desire to not just play the instrument, but become the instrument, “her own untransferable voice.”

Article content

For Lila, emotionally volatile, but constrained on all sides by an implacable industrial-strength earnestness, being a musical artist is not just an occupation or even a calling, but an opportunity to attune her soul to Bach, “who speaks a language I wasn’t aware I knew,” to understand firsthand “divine truth revealed.”