Reviewed By Prof Julian Rushton for The Elgar Society Journal (June 2009)

... if Elgar is again the subject of a novelist's interest, he cannot be excluded from responsibility through having thrown down so many gauntlets: the Variations (including (***)), the Violin Concerto (five dots) and elsewhere...

... Boswell, unlike [some] other novelists, doesn't tamper with known events. That he seems to do precisely that means only that his characters are doing so.

Boswell's techniques include switching viewpoints (sometimes of the same events), and entertaining features such as pastiche newspaper articles and e-mail spam. The novel is structured as an introduction headed 'Enigma', fourteen 'Variations', and a careful Afterword. The 'variations' are just chapters -- if there are ingenious connections with W.M.B., G.R.S., Dorabella, et al., I missed them. But (***) figures strongly in the ostensible mystery, as do several other women of whom Elgar was fond, including his wife. Names -- Ysobel, Winifred -- are used, but the characters are not their Op. 36 namesakes; one is a medium, one a popular novelist, and their activities are crucial to the story. Through the reactions of other characters, and short accounts of séances, Boswell maintains a balance between scepticism and belief -- even once the electronic whizz-kids have taken over to engage in a kind of remote arm-wrestling.

The central character, however, plays no part in all the scheming, for she, the theme, is autistic, and mute; she is also a musical 'savant', a self-taught pianist with a prodigious musical memory who can repeat what she has heard and retain it, to play it again; the plot takes off when she seems to be playing a new, improved version of Elgar's Third Symphony. Her development towards interaction with others through music is the most heartening strain in a complex novel which also allows at least one bit of love to run in a true course.

The usual disclaimer concerning resemblance to 'real persons, living or dead' may not stop readers trying to find a prototype at least for the conductor, 'Sir David' (definitely not Wilcocks) who improbably finds time to write a simple life of Elgar on his website (experienced Elgarians may pass swiftly over these pages, but they are probably needed by other readers, and are tolerably accurate[CLICK HERE for reviewer's footnote!]).

... once well launched into reading, I didn't find it easy to put down.

© Julian Rushton      

[Reproduced with kind permission of the reviewer]