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wombat_88's review
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
catdad77a45's review
5.0
Although I've only read a few of his books, Crace's last one, 2013's 'Harvest', was my favorite to win that year's Booker Prize (alas, it didn't!), and I was saddened to learn he was planning to retire from writing and there would be no new Crace novels. Lucky for us, he decided against that plan and we now have his lovely, elegiac twelfth novel ... something akin to Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' in that it both recapitulates and sums up much of what had gone before, through the wise eyes of an elderly man coming to grips with mortality.
The story is rather simple ... it details a few days in the life of an unnamed town's celebrated citizen, one Alfred Busi, a renowned singer who is to be given a statue commemorating his career in the Avenue of Fame, with an accompanying farewell concert. The day before he is to be honored, he is attacked in his kitchen larder, by what he insists might be a feral child living in 'the bosk', a forested wilderness adjoining the town. He also learns his nefarious nephew is planning to knock down Busi's lifelong residence in favor of luxury condos. Busi's adjustment to these two encumbrances is Crace's contemplative means of addressing many of society's current ills in the post Brexit/Trump universe. Hopefully there will be additional entries to the Crace canon - but if not, he has certainly left us with one of the crowning achievements of his own illustrious career.
My sincere thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for providing me with an ARC of this book a full 7 months prior to publication, in exchange for this honest review.
The story is rather simple ... it details a few days in the life of an unnamed town's celebrated citizen, one Alfred Busi, a renowned singer who is to be given a statue commemorating his career in the Avenue of Fame, with an accompanying farewell concert. The day before he is to be honored, he is attacked in his kitchen larder, by what he insists might be a feral child living in 'the bosk', a forested wilderness adjoining the town. He also learns his nefarious nephew is planning to knock down Busi's lifelong residence in favor of luxury condos. Busi's adjustment to these two encumbrances is Crace's contemplative means of addressing many of society's current ills in the post Brexit/Trump universe. Hopefully there will be additional entries to the Crace canon - but if not, he has certainly left us with one of the crowning achievements of his own illustrious career.
My sincere thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for providing me with an ARC of this book a full 7 months prior to publication, in exchange for this honest review.
lonesomereader's review
3.0
Crace’s new novel “The Melody” focuses on fictional famous singer Alfred Busi who is entering his twilight years living in the dilapidated villa situated in a seaside town where he was born. His position as one of the town’s most prominent and respected citizens is changing to that of a relic from the past as he’s being honoured by a placement in the town’s Hall of Fame. In conjunction with this honour, he’s been invited to give a performance that’s meant to symbolize the crowning achievement of his career. But he’s unsettled by rumblings from strange animals who plunder the rubbish bins outside his house at night and one evening when he goes down to investigate this disturbance he suffers a brief attack by an unknown naked boy who is plundering his larder. This odd occurrence sets him off on a downward spiral as he becomes aware of an impoverished section of the community that represents a perceived threat to the more civilized citizens of the town. He also discovers there are designs to bring down the crumbling villa he shared with his late wife to make way for a swish new modern development. In this way, Crace dramatizes class conflict and the angst of modern life through the collapse of a grieving musician’s life.
Read my full review of The Melody by Jim Crace on LonesomeReader
Read my full review of The Melody by Jim Crace on LonesomeReader
devilstatedan's review
3.0
This story centres around an ageing singer/performer who was once a celebrated entertainer commanding full houses of society's elite. Nowadays he shuffles around suffering from the recent death of his loving wife, but then thing take a sinister turn when he's attacked in his own home by a creature of an unknown origin. His world is challenged as he negotiated his way around the incident and who he once was, who he is now, and what his future holds. Supremely well written with great use of language.
arirang's review
3.0
Harvest was originally to be Jim Crace's last novel but following its, at least to the author, unexpected success (Booker shortlisted, winning the Dublin Literary Award), he decided to continue:
1. His professed nature as a 'fabulist', an inventor of facts, in direct contrast to historic novelists. The desire not to make the book too specific to an actual historic time or place is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's approach to [b:The Buried Giant|22522805|The Buried Giant|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451444392s/22522805.jpg|41115424] but Crace takes the approach further at micro-level as well with his own invented flora, fauna and historic figures.
As I said in my review of Being Dead, Crace's approach is "a wonderful anecdote to the over-researched Wikipedia-regurgitation that bedevils many novels." He himself has said (and NB this was not meant as criticism of Mantel)
It is hard not to see another motivation for this particular novel, even given his avowed lack of personal anecdote in the novels, given that its protagonist is an artist (here a singer song-writer) nearing the end of his career and wondering whether it is worth continuing.
He teased a phrase that might reveal a melody, if he worked on it. Would he find the energy to work on it. He hadn’t written anything worthwhile for a year and more, so why continue now
...
He was aware that whenever in the recent past he had announced in concert that the next song was a new one, there was more regret in the room than excited expectation.
And in some respects. Melody has elements of the singer who, to keep the long-standing fans happy, inserts hooks from his old works into his new songs.
Before the novel begins we have one of Crace's signature made-up epigraphs - a trick he had actually renounced some books ago on the grounds it was too successful - accompanied here by invented acknowledgements, including one that delightfully breaks off mid sentence.
And on page 2 it is "welcome back to Craceland" as we read:
He'd drunk a little more than usual, three or four sweet tots of Boulevard Liqueur, a woman's drink.
The Melody
from previous novels (and I suspect I have missed some books) we have other appearances of this signature invented drink:
What is your favourite drink? (Boulevard Liqueur. No rocks.)
All That Follows
Afterwards, fueled by the older children of the house who'd serve them coffee or little cups of Boulevard Liqueur throughout the night, the neighbours and the relatives would reminisce about the dead, starting with the hearsay of the couple's final, bludgeoned breaths.
Being Dead
Buy one bottle of our Boulevard Liqueur and get a second free.
The Devil's Larder
He was in the advert for Boulevard Liqueur.
Six
And just to hammer home the point, The Melody also has the singer Alfred Busi writing a song about the drink Blue Chartreuse; tourists coming to his home-town often order it in bars only to be told it exists solely in Busi's song, or find themselves fobbed off with a fake concoction.
Craceland fans will also be pleased to see quotes from Mondazy's Truisms, the reappearance of Dell'Ova, a front door made "from the hardest tarbony" and Panache saloon cars (and I'm sure others I have missed).
A crucial role in the story is played by:
What the French would call garrigue but we born here know better as the bosk, a tangled, aromatic, salt-resistant maze of sea-thorn, carob and pine-scrub, later described as a dark spreading mass of tarbonies and pepper oaks, tamarisks and pines, casuarinas and carob trees
Here I wasn't clear if Crace was deliberately using the relatively uncommon English term bosk (e.g. used in Walter Scott's The Lord of the Isles), which seems more a small wood than anything similar to garrigue, or whether Crace had played his usual game of inventing a word only to hit on one that actually exists.
So far I've written a lot of words about Crace's approach, and my scorecard on Craceland bingo, but little about the novel itself. Truth to tell, stripping those elements away, there isn't much to say. There are some nice musings on ageing, such as when Busi has romantic stirrings for his sister-in-law, following the death of his wife Alicia:
It wasn’t wanting her that was overwhelming and disturbing Busi, but wondering, just wondering about the possibilities, the distant and receding possibilities, the what might have been rather than the more stirring and heroic what might be now or in the future. In recent years, even before Alicia died, Busi had noticed his cravings slowly changing tense.
But Crace's political agenda here is too heavy-handed and cliched, there are one or two rather silly elements (a part written on a typewritter without the letter 'o', a character called Lexxx), and the book loses its way completely in the second part, where the narrator reveals himself and becomes part of the story.
A disappointing 2 stars as a stand alone work but 4 as part of Crace's impressive canon - so 3 overall.
I was surprised by its success. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won two international awards. Prize money is not for spending on a cruise or golf club membership. It’s supposed to pay for more books, so the puritan in me said I owed the prizes a novel.The inspiration for Crace's novels comes from unexpected places - the ideas for Harvest came at the Watford Gap, and he explains in detail on the publisher's website the origin of The Melody:
My novels are hardly autobiographical. They tend to spring from something puzzling or troubling beyond my experience rather than from events in my own life. So it was with The Melody. About three years ago, I was on the tenth floor of a lavish hotel in Chennai, India, a guest of the Lit for Life Festival. Everything was perfect – except for one annoyance: I couldn’t sleep because of the ceaseless, metallic racket from the waste ground below my suite. I looked down from the window on my first restless night to watch the hotel’s garbage bins being toppled over and raided for food scraps by, mostly, feral dogs and a few other animals I couldn’t, in that half light, put a name to. A couple of them looked alarmingly like children. I lay awake, disturbed in every sense, until the waiter brought my breakfast on a tray.This quote brings out three key aspects of Crace's work
....
That was the seed for the novel and it provided the question the narrative would hope to answer: What occupies the space between the human mammals in their hotel rooms and those amongst the bins? A realist, autobiographical writer, employing the pen as a camera, might have set the novel in 21st century Chennai. I was wary of that.
....
What I needed was a setting out of Asia and one which could not offend the citizens of any actual place. That meant making up an unnamed nation of my own, something I am very fond of doing. Minting a new world, rather than holding a mirror up to a real one, is a liberation I nearly always search for in my novels for the licence and the freedom it allows. Anything can happen in the realms of make-believe.
So The Melody is set in a time long lost (the late 1920s, say), on a coast unnamed (by the Mediterranean, perhaps) and in a town unbuilt, except within the pages of the novel. ... The only part of Chennai that survives is the night-time racket of the bins - but in The Melody these discords are relocated to disturb the wealth and poverty of an invented place that I hope can stand for Nowadays and Anywhere.
1. His professed nature as a 'fabulist', an inventor of facts, in direct contrast to historic novelists. The desire not to make the book too specific to an actual historic time or place is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's approach to [b:The Buried Giant|22522805|The Buried Giant|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451444392s/22522805.jpg|41115424] but Crace takes the approach further at micro-level as well with his own invented flora, fauna and historic figures.
As I said in my review of Being Dead, Crace's approach is "a wonderful anecdote to the over-researched Wikipedia-regurgitation that bedevils many novels." He himself has said (and NB this was not meant as criticism of Mantel)
A while back Hilary Mantel - the absolute gold standard for historical novelists- issued some very sensible edicts about writing historical novels. Number one was that if you include a fact then you should make sure it is true. I'm not interested in that at all. I don't want facts, I want to make things up and to dig deep into traditional storytelling to produce a tale that illustrates the subject matter I care about.2. His avowed lack of directly autobiographical elements in his novels. From the Paris Review
It’s fascinating to make connections between the life and the writing. That is interesting. But what’s more interesting is the way in which the life and the writing don’t match, don’t mirror each other. It’s the lack of correspondence that’s really remarkable. It’s what makes me think that narrative’s much more deeply placed within us than just personal biography.3. The, sometimes unnoticed and usually quite subtle, but actually quite strong, political element to his works.
It is hard not to see another motivation for this particular novel, even given his avowed lack of personal anecdote in the novels, given that its protagonist is an artist (here a singer song-writer) nearing the end of his career and wondering whether it is worth continuing.
He teased a phrase that might reveal a melody, if he worked on it. Would he find the energy to work on it. He hadn’t written anything worthwhile for a year and more, so why continue now
...
He was aware that whenever in the recent past he had announced in concert that the next song was a new one, there was more regret in the room than excited expectation.
And in some respects. Melody has elements of the singer who, to keep the long-standing fans happy, inserts hooks from his old works into his new songs.
Before the novel begins we have one of Crace's signature made-up epigraphs - a trick he had actually renounced some books ago on the grounds it was too successful - accompanied here by invented acknowledgements, including one that delightfully breaks off mid sentence.
And on page 2 it is "welcome back to Craceland" as we read:
He'd drunk a little more than usual, three or four sweet tots of Boulevard Liqueur, a woman's drink.
The Melody
from previous novels (and I suspect I have missed some books) we have other appearances of this signature invented drink:
What is your favourite drink? (Boulevard Liqueur. No rocks.)
All That Follows
Afterwards, fueled by the older children of the house who'd serve them coffee or little cups of Boulevard Liqueur throughout the night, the neighbours and the relatives would reminisce about the dead, starting with the hearsay of the couple's final, bludgeoned breaths.
Being Dead
Buy one bottle of our Boulevard Liqueur and get a second free.
The Devil's Larder
He was in the advert for Boulevard Liqueur.
Six
And just to hammer home the point, The Melody also has the singer Alfred Busi writing a song about the drink Blue Chartreuse; tourists coming to his home-town often order it in bars only to be told it exists solely in Busi's song, or find themselves fobbed off with a fake concoction.
Craceland fans will also be pleased to see quotes from Mondazy's Truisms, the reappearance of Dell'Ova, a front door made "from the hardest tarbony" and Panache saloon cars (and I'm sure others I have missed).
A crucial role in the story is played by:
What the French would call garrigue but we born here know better as the bosk, a tangled, aromatic, salt-resistant maze of sea-thorn, carob and pine-scrub, later described as a dark spreading mass of tarbonies and pepper oaks, tamarisks and pines, casuarinas and carob trees
Here I wasn't clear if Crace was deliberately using the relatively uncommon English term bosk (e.g. used in Walter Scott's The Lord of the Isles), which seems more a small wood than anything similar to garrigue, or whether Crace had played his usual game of inventing a word only to hit on one that actually exists.
So far I've written a lot of words about Crace's approach, and my scorecard on Craceland bingo, but little about the novel itself. Truth to tell, stripping those elements away, there isn't much to say. There are some nice musings on ageing, such as when Busi has romantic stirrings for his sister-in-law, following the death of his wife Alicia:
It wasn’t wanting her that was overwhelming and disturbing Busi, but wondering, just wondering about the possibilities, the distant and receding possibilities, the what might have been rather than the more stirring and heroic what might be now or in the future. In recent years, even before Alicia died, Busi had noticed his cravings slowly changing tense.
But Crace's political agenda here is too heavy-handed and cliched, there are one or two rather silly elements (a part written on a typewritter without the letter 'o', a character called Lexxx), and the book loses its way completely in the second part, where the narrator reveals himself and becomes part of the story.
A disappointing 2 stars as a stand alone work but 4 as part of Crace's impressive canon - so 3 overall.
benababy85's review
1.0
I wanted to finish it but I could not. it was was too slow paced for me and it was not the book I had anticipated from the synopsis at the back
priscilla's review
1.0
1,5 stars.
This was a complete mismatch to my expectations after reading the back cover. May just be that this isn't my book, and that other people do really love the writing style and see something more in this story, but for me it just didn't pick up at all. A few moments were exciting, and I thought, oh, here comes the heart of the story. But then it stayed out. Also, the heaps of description instead of actually letting scenes play out just isn't my preferred style of reading.
The cover is still very pretty though.
This was a complete mismatch to my expectations after reading the back cover. May just be that this isn't my book, and that other people do really love the writing style and see something more in this story, but for me it just didn't pick up at all. A few moments were exciting, and I thought, oh, here comes the heart of the story. But then it stayed out. Also, the heaps of description instead of actually letting scenes play out just isn't my preferred style of reading.
The cover is still very pretty though.
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