How many of you still haven't read Jessica's Rites of Spring? I pre-ordered my copy. I have never been so organised about anything in my life.
Read reviews and the first three pages here; my review's below.
You
can read Rites of Spring as a tale of a family's
breakdown under modern pressure. Its characters unfold intriguingly
alongside a pacy plot and moments of real poetry. Yet it isn't their
familiar shopping at Waitrose, holidaying in Greece, or strolling
through Richmond Park that hold our attention. No aga-saga, this
novel is about the problems facing the human spirit – not just
those who make it in the end, but those who don't.
Like Duchen herself, jointly writer and
musician, the novel spans the creative arts. Its various artists
(sensitive and introspective as they are) illuminate the crucial
focus on our souls. There is a world-famous concert pianist; a
respectable music academic; a talented artist who is airbrushing
porn to support his family; a once promising dancer who had to give
it up when she got pregnant, but is none the less carving out a good
career for herself as a cultural commentator. None of these
characters lack talent or application - or even opportunity,
middle-class as they are - but they enjoy different levels of
success. Most poignant of all is thirteen year old Liffy, desparate
to be a ballet dancer, but whose joints will never flex the right way
to enter the profession.
Punctuating their stories is an
unpredictable primal power, a force of nature, kind or unkind, and
with the wild double terror and beauty of Stravinsky's Rite of
Spring. It pulls us in
unexpected directions, like Stravinsky's deliberately awkward
ballerinas. Just as we cannot control, but are instead controlled by
it, the novel's artists need luck, as well as talent and
application, to realise their dreams.
Alongside
the central significance of her title, Duchen's overwhelming question
already springs out on the cover: “When does a free spirit
become a lost soul?”. On fortune's wheel, the characters
nonetheless have a choice: bitter self-destruction, or to live.
Liffy has to choose self-control, or a giddy sense of purity, from
the anorexia that threatens to kill her, or to accept the ballet
career she'll never have “isn't the be all and end all, is it?”.
Choose Life, urged Irvin Welsh, but it
isn't just junkies who find it impossible. Music, or any art form,
is a mistress like Stravinsky's score: savage, frightening.
glorious. We can grasp, usually, that successful artists put their
real lives second, like the novel's ever travelling pianist Vladimir.
We tend to forget the same agony faced by those with equal passion
and without the luck. At its heart, the novel (indirectly, but
powerfully) understands Benjamin Britten's sadly knowing: “It is
cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the
beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The
beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love.”
The Rite of Spring dances
a girl to death, a sacrifice to please the God of Spring. Rites
of Spring stops a girl dancing,
in the end, so she can live, and brings the two characters who think
mostly of nothing but music a child. The will to live, and the drive
for life perpetually to renew itself, courses alongside the
individuals disappointed along the way.
What we want defines our lives. Sometimes we get it, and sometimes not. Private sadnesses lurk in our shadows, part of reality. There is also something always turning towards the sun.
