The cacophonous closing chapters are not entirely convincing, but overall Fuller – winner of the 2015 Desmond Elliott prize – breathes new life into the novel, interlacing it with other art forms, to poignantly portray the transience of time. She also enables the reader to visualise abstract emotions and in painterly images pinpoints transformative moments. The author, who was one of the Observer’s standout debut novelists of 2015, is also an artist, a talent everywhere apparent in the pictorial prose, conjuring the forest bounded by mountain and river. The song becomes a key survival strategy, Peggy describing how “I used to measure the time” – the music growing to be “etched into my every cell”. Peggy learns the only sheet music he has taken with them, La Campanella by Liszt. Out in the forest, James teaches Peggy to play a piano he has made out of pebbles and wood, although it is silent. Music weaves through the mesmerising story and pianos play a powerful role in the plot, calling to mind other storylines in which they have proved instrumental, from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening to Jane Campion’s The Piano. Fuller enables the reader to visualise abstract emotions and in painterly images pinpoints transformative moments
Ute met her husband James one fateful day when he was her page-turner at a concert in New Yorkconducted by Leonard Bernstein, but marital discord ensued when James refused to change his tune about the imminent end of the world. The dual narrative moves deftly between eight-year-old Peggy’s perspective and that of 17-year-old Peggy as she readjusts to life back with her mother, Ute, a German concert pianist. The novelist keeps a skilful grip on her own sense of timing as she chronicles characters who lose track of time.
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