Grosse Fugue presents the fictional biography of virtuoso violinist Reuben Mendel as told to a freelance music critic and pianist who met the great man in the years leading up to his death.
A world war one veteran and Holocaust survivor, Mendel saw his life and career shaped by 20th century European history. As the title suggests, the narrative is an attempt to weave the recurring themes of loss and suffering he encountered into a Meisterwerk on the continent's most violent era.
Sadly, Ian Phillips's writing is not equal to his ambitions. Overblown and clichéd, the narrative frequently descends into hysterical rhetoric. Storm clouds gather over blasted heaths and we hear repeatedly about the 'millennial wanderings' of the Jews – indeed, by his own admission, Reuben's father Moses is 'locked […] in the immutable past of our forefathers'.
Any attempt to discern rounded characters in this fog of generalisations is further hampered by long, pompous passages about European history and culture. All British literature and music, we learn, is stunted by virtue of the nation being an island.
Phillips does create some tense and engaging moments, particularly in the middle section where the Mendel family adopts the disguise of Roman Catholic pilgrims in an attempt to flee occupied France. There are also some nice ideas about the potential of using musical structure in the text – the 'Intermezzo #1' chapter, for example, where the narrative breaks into isolated words shortly after the family is captured, is clever.
However, these are not enough to redeem the novel. In the year that Aharon Appelfeld set a new bar for Holocaust fiction, this falls very far short.
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