Reviews
David Malcolm - Chair, Department of Literary Studies, Institute of English Philology, University of Gdańsk:
"Julian Wolfreys’s Silent Music is a rich and ambitious novel. It is a memoir – following the life of a group of musical friends from the mid-1970s through to the early 1980s. As such, it is also a novel of warm and complex friendships, centered on the music scene of the south of England and northern Europe. It is a love story – moving, uplifting, and desperately sad by turns. It is an evocation of a particular time and particular places – the Isle of Wight and northern Germany, above all.
Wolfreys excels at conjuring up landscapes, colors, sounds, shifts of light. The Isle of Wight has surely never had such a fine praise-singer.
It is also a book of reflections – on passing time, death, memory, love, friendship, and, strikingly, music. Wolfreys achieves the almost impossible; he writes about music and music-making in ways that must fascinate, entertain, and inform even the non-musical. Like a fine Victorian novel, this is a great book to immerse yourself in and relish its variety. You will laugh, you will weep, you will be surprised, you will be informed."
"Julian Wolfreys’s Silent Music is a rich and ambitious novel. It is a memoir – following the life of a group of musical friends from the mid-1970s through to the early 1980s. As such, it is also a novel of warm and complex friendships, centered on the music scene of the south of England and northern Europe. It is a love story – moving, uplifting, and desperately sad by turns. It is an evocation of a particular time and particular places – the Isle of Wight and northern Germany, above all.
Wolfreys excels at conjuring up landscapes, colors, sounds, shifts of light. The Isle of Wight has surely never had such a fine praise-singer.
It is also a book of reflections – on passing time, death, memory, love, friendship, and, strikingly, music. Wolfreys achieves the almost impossible; he writes about music and music-making in ways that must fascinate, entertain, and inform even the non-musical. Like a fine Victorian novel, this is a great book to immerse yourself in and relish its variety. You will laugh, you will weep, you will be surprised, you will be informed."
Imprint: Triarchy Press (triarchy fiction)
Published: October 2014 320pp. ~ 15.3 x 23 cm Paperback ISBN: 978-1-909470-41-5 Price: £12.50 Tags: Music, dreams, memory, Derrida, hauntology. Go to the book's main page. Read more:
Silent Music Home Page
The Author Silent Music flyer A Blessing - Brian Hinton Other Triarchy Fiction Titles: |
Brian Hinton MBE:
This is a novel about time and regret, verbally exuberant, yet centring around moments quite beyond language. “The music has ended, remaining a memory, a silent music you once called it, that small space between the last note and the first pair of hands closing together”. Here is a fiction cunningly structured as musical form, a free form concerto, with prelude and coda. The freshly added entr’acte draws from Commedia Del Arte, with a nod to the cod Victoriana of Gilbert and Sullivan, evoking a night of storm and passion. Now with added text and song lyrics from its original, privately printed first draft, the novel is an exact portrait of a lost time and place. Here is the Isle of Wight between progressive rock and punk - and Mrs Thatcher - with passages of great beauty and verbal exuberance. But through that emerges a picture of youthful hopes and optimism, and their shocking disruption. It is a love story and an elegy. Its deepest note, and raison d’être, comes near the end: “aground, belated, overtaken by darkness, bereft, I find comfort in words”. The novel tracks, with humour and wonder, a local rock band’s travails, from guest spots at an open mic to pub gigs and local recording studios, culminating in a European tour (conducted in a rattling old van) and the band falling apart. Here is show biz, viewed from the bottom. The action takes in, along the way, village fetes, snooty Ryde cafes, test cricket and Porridge, and a cast of eccentrics, young and old. But this is also a deeply serious modernist work, influenced by Virginia Woolf and Eliot’s Four Quartets, and written by a leading literary scholar, in which words flow, halt and play, to attain the state of music. A text which in turn has informed the lyrics of Julian’s new band the Nightwatchmen, comprising other members of the IoW music scene commemorated here, performed to a backdrop of vintage photographs from the time. And the novel itself is spurred into life through the ‘silent music’ of a photograph album, “a kingdom of ghosts”. Read A Blessing - a new poem by Brian Hinton |
Bob White
(WHY READ A REVIEW WHEN YOU COULD BE READING THE BOOK?) I laughed, I cried, Imagined, Identified. I heard the music through my tinnitus, Scored and improvised; Familiar scenes were set, Retrieved from times and places memorised. I met the friends and hangers-on, A collective, and beyond; Forever creating, formulating; I belonged. Love; The band; The Isle of Wight the canvas and the soundtrack, The fertile land. Home; Here and there; There and here; Excursions north and east, elsewhere. Summer’s sweaty heat; Winter’s darkest nights; Audiences: The Harbour Lights. Swirling; Brooding; Growing; Moving. You had to be there, of course; Of course. But I have been there, By choice, by force. Ballads; melodies; Cacophonies; Strings and keys; Did you keep the recordings, please? Frame by faded frame; Fragments reviewed; Memories rewound, Renewed. And in the end, There is no end, no commencement; Just phases and phrases, Countering time’s advancement. These are just words about words, As honest as they are absurd; The Silent Music plays on in the mind, Where in the silence beauty is heard. Bob White (28 Nov 2014, Costa, Ryde Pier Head) |