The Music Stories Author:James Hamilton- Paterson In this collection of short stories, the acclaimed author of Greontius, a fictional account of Elgar's journey to the Amazon, offers fables and fictions on creativity, tradition and loss. A love of music unites these stories, and each in its different way has a musical theme. — An escaped lunatic who thinks he is Schumann interrupts a quite fami... more »ly picnic and introduces a crazy note to the life of a child; a young Croat refugee, whose only remaining bond of trust or civility is his ability to play the guitar, enters and distrubs a woman's life; and in a lovely parable of the relationship between innovation and tradition, a Chinese master instructs his pupil in the music of nature and an unchanging corpus of tunes, but the pupil betrays him by wanting to add to nature and write his own. These paranoias of censorship and abstruse scholarship are mocked together in a comic story about the composer in a 'workers state' whose task it is to decode hidden subversion in the new national anthem.
This is a brilliant sequence which will confirm Hamilton-Paterson's reputation as a writer of diverse gifts.« less