Gaps and Music

I've now read two of Helen Garner's novels, The Spare Room, from 2008, her most recent, which I wrote about in my blog on 4/21/2024 and The Children's Bach, a 1984 novel republished in 2023. At first, I thought The Spare Room was my favorite. It has fewer characters, a more robust plot, and a stronger counterpoint between the two central characters, the first-person narrator and an old friend of hers who occupies the spare room for an extended visit.

And though The Children's Bach is dialed down from the relative urgencies of The Spare Room, I read it a second time (both novels are under 200 pages) and now it is my favorite. What Garner achieves in a quieter, but restless third person narrative is inspiring and, in its humble way, this novel has a majesty The Spare Room doesn't achieve.

Yet the narrative IS restless: While The Spare Room is about two older single women, The Children's Bach follows the intersections of three families. The core family is the only one that is intact; that is, there are two parents, one house, two children. And yet, the core family contains the seed of its own destruction in the form of a younger child with a never defined developmental disability that causes him to vocalize constantly, and often at unnervingly high decibels. And despite the more relaxed pacing of The Children's Bach, Garner creates two extended scenes of such heightened emotions, the reader feels heartache in one and a full, splendid happiness in the other. She builds to these emotions with great care, yet nothing feels predictable. How does she do it?

Well, she tells us her rules as a novelist in very clear terms. They are wrapped into a scene that occurs ten pages before the novel comes to an end when Phillip, a popular song writer and musician, is giving advice to an aspiring song writer who has come to his hotel room, ready to do whatever she needs to do to get the attention of the famous one. Never compromising her in any way, he says this:

"Listen, I like your song. Look, I'll give you a tip. Go home and write it again. Take out the clichés. Everybody knows 'It always happens this way' or 'I went in with my eyes wide open.' Cut that stuff out. Just leave in the images. Know what I mean? You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don't. Between cliché and the other thing. Make gaps. Don't chew on it. Don't explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest" (149).

Leave holes. The music will do the rest are words for the writer too. Let's look at them more closely. Narrative gaps were the first quality I noticed in this novel. As the omniscient narrator jumps from scene to scene, the connecting filler is done away with. There is nothing extraneous anywhere, though there are lots of close-ups of daily life that may not, at first, strike a reader as being significant. I began to think of them as bright moments. For instance, there is the conversation at a dinner party between eight people who are having separate conversations with each other simultaneously. It is a wonderful quilting of words, names, phrases, and bits of song interwoven with occasional thought as the point of view moves from character to character. It's word music and it's dramatic and moving even in a novel I wouldn't call lyrical.

Here's another bright moment: Elizabeth, a singer, takes Poppy, Phillip's teenage daughter, to a store that sells musical instruments. This sentence sets the scene: "The house of music was lumbered with grands, a noble line of them, each fluttering a many-digited price tag. Their lids were propped open as if to catch a breath of air." What a great couple of sentences in terms of image and word choice. We go on:

"Poppy fronted up to a big black Bösendorfer and settled herself on the bench" (79). She plays something quickly, and a salesman who is sitting at a Steinway in another row, plays something next and they begin a flirtatious call and response that causes the shoppers to stop and listen, "pretending not to because it was so intimate" (80).

What does this event in the music store lead to? Nothing really, but because there are gaps everywhere and nothing is explained, the reader is trained to take things as they arise and not insist on the more intellectual question of why. It's this acceptance that allowed me to see it simply as a bright moment.

Garner is an optimist. Her novels show that things have an indefatigable way of working out. How and with whom is what interests her and, as a result, the reader too. She rings in the end of this slender novel with resounding orchestral chords as one of the characters in the core family completes a quest in a manner I wasn't expecting. My relief at this turn morphed into a great bubbling joy as I watched the character do things I found utterly right but surprising.

Garner, Helen, The Children's Bach. New York: Pantheon, 2023.