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

“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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

So, that goes well.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

Never off-putting or pretentious — a testy, all-too human protagonist like Lila helps offset that possibility — Fischer Guy skilfully manoeuvres a tightrope tethered between the inner life of the artist and the oblivious exterior world in which artistic and intellectual freedoms are imperilled by those for whom ignorance is its own primitive art form. The loss of individual choice is a sort of death for artists and art and a warning to everyone else. The ballet slipper crushed under the heel of the jackboot represents the end of personhood, the sublimation of all that makes us who and what we are, whether we are rehearsing arias or trimming trees.

By anchoring Lila’s contemporary personal artistic struggle to the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and to her grandmother’s principled resistance, by linking it to the idea of generational responsibility, the author makes room for those existing tensions, between duty to art and self, and obligation to life and community, which helps ground the story in real-world challenges and consequences.

Writing in an esthetically sophisticated but accessible way about music and its execution, Fischer Guy accomplishes something remarkable — she never panders to her audience by clumsily filling in knowledge gaps or going easy on people like me who view Chopsticks with a reverence typically reserved for the Goldberg Variations, but chooses instead to compel reader imagination about what we don’t know. In so doing, she somehow makes it knowable, transporting us to the “elsewhere of music.”

You don’t need to be a student of music to appreciate all that Fischer Guy talks about here, but you’ll wish you were. In the end, it doesn’t matter. The music comes alive in the words on the page, like notes in a score. She writes of Lila that she “…builds a cathedral of music … not big and showy … but a hand-built chapel of exquisite craftsmanship, deep in a quiet wood where only the very lucky would ever find it.”

You might say something similar about The Instrument Must Not Matter.

This woman can write. Brava. These days, that’s enough to make anybody cry.

Elizabeth Kelly is the author of Apologize, Apologize!, The Last Summer of the Camperdowns, and The Miracle on Monhegan Island .