The Sound of Silence

In my friendly north London neighbourhood, people often leave discarded household items and clothes out for eagle-eyed passers-by to help themselves: saucepans, DVDs, shoes and – quite often – books. But for someone to put out just one brand-new, seemingly unread book? That’s unusual.

I picked up Jennifer Atkins’s The Cellist because its bright front cover was inviting and the title tempted me. Turning it over, I learned that the novel was about ‘love and music, and the silence and inscrutability which underpin the performance of each’. I was intrigued, took it home, read it in a single dazzled sitting, and turned to Google to discover what reception had been given to such an assured first novel. Published in July 2022, it had been, I imagined, a popular pick for summer reading lists. I found nothing, not a word. It was as if the book had never existed. Had I missed some awful flaw, overestimated its brilliance? Reading it once again, I felt both reassured and desolate. Jennifer Atkins is a remarkable writer who has written subtly and with eerily sharp understanding about a notoriously challenging subject. Not one reviewer had given her so much as a mention. Silence – as I don’t need to tell fellow-writers – is the harshest of fates. For a book that (in my view) merited a place on fiction prize lists, such treatment seemed grotesque. Here then is a gesture towards the appreciation this exceptional new writer deserves. Luciana (Luc) is a cellist in her late twenties, still living at home with her parents, when she meets William Lant (Billy), a sculptor. Beyond a few brief flings with fellow musicians, her life revolves around the determination to become a successful solo performer. Her cello (made by an Italian luthier, it seems likely to be a Stradivarius) sets the limit of her ambitions. ‘I believe in my instrument in the same way I believe in my own life,’ Luc says – and we believe her. Casually, she mentions her first ominous glimpse of a cello, ‘hanging in the window of a music shop like a bright, red carcase’. Luc herself has been playing a cello since she was 5. A gay male composer who wants to work with Luc advises her not to bother about men. She should stick to her instrument. Billy, the sternly ambitious young sculptor with whom Luc falls in love, knows nothing about music. Tenderly, in one of the novel’s most memorable scenes, Luc explains to her lover how it feels to listen to Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar’s Cello Concerto, to hear it ‘as if the music is just then being written’. Billy sketches Luc while she talks to him, sitting cross-legged and naked on the floor. Later, still naked, she plays him to sleep with the Elgar: ‘I remember the half moon, the smell of the limes, the warm night . . .’ Much of Atkins’s quietly eloquent novel is written in retrospect. During the first turbulent months of her affair with Billy, weeping in the privacy of her morning shower, Luc confronts failure. ‘I was turning thirty and I was not yet, in my mind, the musician I wanted to be . . . I knew Billy was a sculptor. But I was not yet a cellist.’ Later, we learn that Billy and Luc have spent their longest time together in Spain, at a house that Billy has recently inherited (by default, due to an unmade will) from a father who had – incomprehensibly – hated him. For Billy, the Andalucian villa offers the chance to make peace with a bitter past: it is where he feels most creative. For Luc, it is a place of convalescence where she can begin to recover from a devastating experience that quickens the heart of the novel. Serving as Billy’s model during a period when she herself is unable to perform, nor even to play, Luc feels robbed of her independence and authority. And yet: ‘I needed him. The need was the sharp edge I slid along.’ Both Billy and the gay composer are present at the terrifying occasion when Luc suffers a mysterious seizure while performing a video-art composition so cutting-edge that the audience believes the seizure is part of the performance. Billy takes her to hospital. Released, she finds that she can no longer read music or bear to touch the cello. All future performances are abruptly cancelled. Her life becomes a void. Marooned inside the productive Billy’s Spanish home, she finds it ‘inconsiderate’ that her lover has become increasingly sought-after and successful. At night, after sex, she lies alone in the dark beside the cello she can no longer play. Atkins doesn’t indicate precisely what releases Luc from her paralysis, but it clearly has to do with distancing herself from Billy. Playing a new work by the gay composer, a composition that is filled with silences, she struggles to overcome her fear: ‘silence was what I’d fallen into the last time I was on the stage, and I couldn’t face entering it again’. For a brief moment, she feels hatred for the instrument to which she is bound: ‘I stood over the body, imagining my foot through its belly, the strings ripped off, the neck broken.’ Yet, encouraged by the sympathetic composer, slowly she masters her fears. A sense of silence and loss becomes the primary quality of Luc’s new, altered and widely praised performances; separated from Billy, ‘I found my interpretation, and I was able to play . . . better than anyone else would have.’ Deftly, Atkins allows the reader to understand that the elegiac sense of absence and loss that have become the hallmark of Luc’s playing directly relates to the slow stages of her estrangement from the only man she has ever loved. Episodes describing her gradual ascent to international success as a solo performer are interleaved with Luc’s increasingly rare encounters with Billy. Some are troublingly strange: on one occasion Luc flies out to Spain to see him but returns home the same night, never having emerged from the airport terminal. Others are erotic; touching; odd. Learning that Billy abruptly abandoned another lover when the woman was six months pregnant with his child, Luc becomes obsessed. Could he have done such a brutal thing to her? Why is it that Luc can see nothing of herself in the sculpture of her prominently displayed at one of Billy’s exhibitions? How much, she wonders, does Billy know her, or she him? Strangest of all is the divided couple’s last, accidental encounter in Milan. Luc, there to perform a new Italian piece by a woman composer, is enjoying a brief passionate affair. Billy has meanwhile arrived (too coincidentally, perhaps), ostensibly to show the Italian city’s great cathedral to his mother. Once again he begs Luc to come back to him; after refusing and making a hasty departure, she breaks down in tears. Loss, as Atkins at last makes explicit, is essential to the cellist’s performances; each searing parting from her lover – Luc is always the leaver – heightens the sensitivity of her playing. Briefly, and memorably, Atkins allows Luc to explain her predicament by its analogy to a remarkable modern work which haunts her, just as it now haunts me. William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops was completed on 9/11, the date on which the Twin Towers came down, and features his own old recordings of ambient noise (wind, car engines, factory horns). Basinski’s fragile tapes gradually disintegrated, but the composer persisted, reproducing not just the ghostly sounds, but the silences between them where the tape itself had become bare: stripped. It’s from that same consciousness of loss, of what is no longer sustainable, that Jennifer Atkins composes her intense narrative of the relationship between Luc’s performances and a devouringly intense love affair that slowly becomes faint and ghostlike: a haunting of the mind that underlies the cellist’s eventual triumph in a way that Luc explains with poignant resignation. My mind always fills these blanks in, yet what’s lost keeps being lost, over and over. I try to understand that what breaks down may never have been whole to begin with, but often unity is a fantasy I can’t relinquish. The process is letting go, but it’s something I can’t manage. Sad, wise, troubling and assured, The Cellist marks the debut of an arresting new voice in fiction. I’m eager to see what Atkins writes next – and hopeful that the silence about which she writes so well will not discourage her.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Miranda Seymour 2024