Meet the Cornish family and their assorted friends and hangers-on. Well, hang on, actually we don't need to meet them as we've already met them (well, most of them anyway) in the two previous novels The Rebel Angels and What's Bred In The Bone. You may recall that Arthur Cornish and his wife Maria are the custodians of the Cornish Foundation, handling the allocation of various monies from the late Francis Cornish's will to noble and worthwhile artistic causes. You may also recall that Francis Cornish was involved in some murky business involving art forgery during the Second World War, and also involved with art forgery in a much more direct sense when his own painting The Marriage At Cana is hailed as a lost sixteenth-century masterpiece.
These two things provide the principal narrative threads for The Lyre Of Orpheus; firstly the Cornish Foundation agrees to finance the production of an opera based on some of the unfinished works of ETA Hoffmann as part of a highly-promising music student's doctoral dissertation. Secondly, foundation trustee Simon Darcourt is writing a biography of Francis Cornish and has started to smell a rat with certain aspects of The Marriage At Cana, principally because several of the subjects portrayed appear to have been modelled on people from Francis' life.
Just as it did in What's Bred In The Bone Simon's biography mostly provides a framing device here; the main business of the narrative is about the production of the opera, which turns out to be about King Arthur and entitled Arthur Of Britain (and subtitled The Magnanimous Cuckold). The music prodigy charged with completing the score is a scrawny young woman called Hulda Schnakenburg (but referred to by everyone as Schnak). A distinguished Swedish conductor, Gunilla Dahl-Soot, is brought in as mentor and musical advisor to Schnak and promptly announces her presence by drinking the trustees under the table and then seducing Schnak. Darcourt himself is given the task of writing the libretto (with a bit of help from some of the minor characters), and the job of producing and directing is given to Geraint Powell, a friend of Arthur and a stereotypical flowing-locked, booming-voiced professional Welshman.
And so it principally falls to Geraint to round up all the various people required to bring the (at this stage still to be written) opera to life: singers, costume designers, set constructors, a suitable venue, and of course a claque, a group of people planted around the audience who will prompt the rest of the audience to clap, boo, laugh, cry, be quiet, etc., at the right moments. This last role is gleefully picked up by Maria's extended Gypsy family, in particular her uncle Yerko who turns out to have some previous experience in this area. Hardest game in the world, the old claquing game, etc.
Anyway, challenges are overcome, temperamental music types are placated, and the production is premiered to public and critics (and Yerko and his claque) and, all things considered, reasonably well-received. Schnak's doctoral assessors are sufficiently impressed to award her the doctorate and kick off a career everyone assumes will be a stellar one. Meanwhile Simon's biography is finished, complete with some revelations about the true origins of the Marriage At Cana, and the work itself has been secured for display at a prominent gallery.
Below this surface narrative some other stuff is playing out as well; firstly there are some interludes seemingly narrated by the unquiet spirit of Hoffmann himself, watching over the adaptation of his unfinished work from some purgatorial beyond-the-grave location and wondering whether its completion will finally free him from limbo and enable him to shuffle off to eternal rest. Secondly the foundation's trustees find themselves playing out some of the opera's themes and assuming the roles of some of the opera's principal characters - Arthur is, erm, Arthur, obviously, which makes Maria Guinevere, and sure enough there is an interlude where she is seduced by Geraint aka Lancelot.
Neither of these bits of meta-narrative work especially convincingly, to be honest: the Hoffmann interludes seem a bit sparse and perfunctory, as if Davies wasn't really totally convinced about the idea. And the bits where the characters are obliged to do unconvincing out-of-character things (in particular, Geraint and Maria's brief liaison) just to fit in with the idea of re-enacting the events of an earlier story is about as successful as these things usually are, i.e. not very. Michael Dibdin had his whole cast of characters (Aurelio Zen included) re-enact the plot of an opera in Cosi Fan Tutti and it resulted in one of the least-enjoyable of the Zen novels, to me at least. In general, while this is never less than enjoyable, intelligent and thought-provoking it's definitely the weakest of the three novels in the trilogy.
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