Radio 4 Bookclub: The Music Room by William Fiennes
Editor: Radio 4's Bookclub, where authors discuss their best known book with readers, is broadcast on the first Sunday every month and is presented by James Naughtie. Jim writes a monthly newsletter that goes out a few days before broadcast which we also post on the Radio 4 blog.
This month Bookclub talks to William Fiennes about his book . More details of how you can listen to this episode of Bookclub and the extensive archive are at the bottom of the page - PM.
One of the qualities of that I most admire is the way that William Fiennes manages to write the story of his older brother - who died as a result of epilepsy when he was 41 - without a touch of mawkishness, nor as he put it to us on Bookclub by turning it into a 'misery memoir'.
Holding the line is difficult when you're talking about something so intimate - a family life shaped by a mysterious and sometimes frightening illness, the feeling of loss that is still with the author, an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of childhood. I think he gave our readers the clue when he was asked why he thought it read like a novel and replied that although it was about someone real, whom he knew and whose life he experienced first-hand, it was a book of the imagination, in which particular images created a life around themselves.
He cited the opening of the book in which a firework explodes in church and he uses the image to explain how the book works - as the discovery of consciousness exploding in the world, about his brother Richard, the family, himself.
The first thing about the family is that it is unusual. William was brought up in (though it is never named in the book) and padded through its halls as a boy looking at clanking suits of armour and vast portraits, pursued by (friendly) ghosts. There was a moat, and a history that turned the place into a tourist haunt and a place where filmmakers came to recreate the past. Not a normal place, and Richard - whose illness William only came to understand after his death - was what he calls "a novel person", whose story is the inspiration for a book which William describes as "a way of remembering, loving."
Part of the pleasure of life, he told us, is that there is good and bad. The bad times, when Richard was in the grip of his illness and found it hard - as William puts it - to judge his own strength have to be part of the story, because it would have diminished him to leave them out. "This book is the grown-up me trying to approach Richard," he says.
The Music Room is not easy to define, like which was William's first book and was . The title is taken from the room in the castle where William was happiest as a boy and where he played. "It is an important place because there are strong memories of Richard in here. He would sing, play the double bass there....the tuning fork of him was sounded in there." And, because it is written as a recollection of a life that has ended, it includes William's own exploration of the history of neuroscience, to discover the things he didn't know about brain disorders when his brother was alive.
He was asked an intriguing question by one of this month's group of readers, about the recurrence in the book of the idea of thresholds - between the conscious and the unconsciousness, the private world of the castle to the public world outside, the feeling of swimming in the moat with pike nibbling at your feet and then rising to the sunlight above. He acknowledged that the idea was one he'd thought about a great deal and that it did represent one of the themes in the book. "One of the stories is about a young boy, the 'me' figure, pushing through a door in the music room into this world which is rather strange and threatening and full of ghosts and the subconscious."
The consequence is that The Music Room is about the writer's journey - into his past and also, in the present, into the world that he did not understand when he wishes that he had. Richard - 'Rich' to William - emerges as a figure of great complexity and the focus of great affection. "This book is about caring for people close to you and the places you live in."
I do hope you enjoy the book, and our discussion, on Sunday July 3 at 4 o'clock on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 and again on Thursday July 7 at the same time.
Our next recording is in Edinburgh on September 19th, when will be talking about his first, remarkable, novel .
If you want to be part of the reading group on that occasion, or at a future recording, just visit our website.
Happy reading.
James Naughtie presents Bookclub
- You can hear William Fiennes in conversation on Bookclub on the Radio 4 website.
- Read reviews of William Fiennes' The Music Room from ; and .
- Read about
- There is a Ö÷²¥´óÐã Books and Authors podcast that includes this episode of Bookclub that you can download, listen to online or subscribe to.
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