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Gerontius
Nearing the end of his career, Sir Edward Elgar, the British composer, impulsively decides to travel to Brazil, where he encounters a woman from his past
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1991
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211 people want to read
About the author
James Hamilton-Paterson
41 books94 followersJames Hamilton-Paterson is a British poet, novelist, and one of the most private literary figures of his generation. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, he began his career as a journalist before emerging as a novelist with a distinctive lyrical style. He gained early recognition for Gerontius, a Whitbread Award-winning novel, and went on to write Ghosts of Manila and America’s Boy, incisive works reflecting his deep engagement with the Philippines. His interests range widely, from history and science to aviation, as seen in Seven-Tenths and Empire of the Clouds. He also received praise for his darkly comic Gerald Samper trilogy. Hamilton-Paterson divides his time between Austria, Italy, and the Philippines and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 6, 2020
Marvelous story about the ageing Edward Elgar who's trying to recapture his muse in composing his elusive Third Symphony. The opening chapters of the book are unforgettable.
Update 2020: upon rereading the novel has lost nothing of its power. It's a splendidly narrated story about the mourning psyche. Mourning for the loss of creative powers, of a life companion, of countless young men in a senseless war, of a whole world and its values. I've read much by Hamilton-Paterson since, but I haven't found anything that transcends Gerontius in depth and humanity.
Update 2020: upon rereading the novel has lost nothing of its power. It's a splendidly narrated story about the mourning psyche. Mourning for the loss of creative powers, of a life companion, of countless young men in a senseless war, of a whole world and its values. I've read much by Hamilton-Paterson since, but I haven't found anything that transcends Gerontius in depth and humanity.
February 17, 2015
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 5, 2014
I loved this book. I am not sure how interesting it would be for someone with no interest in so-called "classical" music, with its references to Elgar's music and that of other composers. But as a study of a man who has almost lost his musical creativity, and has lived through the Great War and seen it shatter his world, it is very moving indeed.
Hamilton-Paterson's writing is beautiful. Here is a description of night falling on the Amazon:
It is the moment between dusk and dark when the forest stops breathing in and prepares for its night-long exhalation. With the vanishing of sunset's colour the water slides around the river bend like liquid slate, its surface scrawled faintly with poolings and involutions. The first fireflies blink over the mud among the rot and tangle at the jungle's edge. At the last moment of visibility a shadow comes and goes on the water although the air above seems to hold nothing more substantial than moths and midges - certainly nothing which could draw beneath it the outline of jagged wings. This slow flap as of membranes supporting a most ancient thing crabs its way upstream at an angle and is lost almost as soon as the eye thinks to have seen its shadow. A strange cry comes from invisible mid-river and at once a thousand frogs burst into steady unison.
Hamilton-Paterson's writing is beautiful. Here is a description of night falling on the Amazon:
It is the moment between dusk and dark when the forest stops breathing in and prepares for its night-long exhalation. With the vanishing of sunset's colour the water slides around the river bend like liquid slate, its surface scrawled faintly with poolings and involutions. The first fireflies blink over the mud among the rot and tangle at the jungle's edge. At the last moment of visibility a shadow comes and goes on the water although the air above seems to hold nothing more substantial than moths and midges - certainly nothing which could draw beneath it the outline of jagged wings. This slow flap as of membranes supporting a most ancient thing crabs its way upstream at an angle and is lost almost as soon as the eye thinks to have seen its shadow. A strange cry comes from invisible mid-river and at once a thousand frogs burst into steady unison.
May 7, 2010
I went on an Elgar jag in college. While my friends were toking and poking to Iron Maiden (or Simon & Garfunkel for the less adventurous), I chose the higher musical road of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. And the adagio from Bruckers 8th (one of the most sensual/sexual pieces ever written). For some reason (probably because the Cello Concerto is so amazing) I got it into my head to collect every Elgar opus number on CD. That would be impossible in the States, but since I was a hop away from Toronto (in the days you could drive back and forth across the border as easy as running to the 7/11) with their enlightened record stores this became a worthy doable goal. I completed the task in under a year and today when people peruse my CD’s I hear mental grinding when they get to the Elgar shelves. Oh well.
There are only a half dozen Elgar opus numbers played the concert halls today but trust me on this—there is a massive amount of works deserving to be heard. One of the double disc sets was what appeared to me a throwback to the great oratorio days of Handel called ‘The Dream of Gerontius.’ I fell in love immediately. It is a massive choral work, a little like the fever dream it is based on. Trust me again—it is wonderful.
The book ‘Gerontius’ has nothing to do with the music. The conceit would be: here are the imagined dreams of Elgar during his mysterious trip up the Amazon. The trip was real – and atypical for a Victorian composer who was completely staid in his home life. It’s a great idea. But esoteric to the point of boredom. Sometimes ‘literature’ can be dull. I’ll keep the music active and shelve the book.
There are only a half dozen Elgar opus numbers played the concert halls today but trust me on this—there is a massive amount of works deserving to be heard. One of the double disc sets was what appeared to me a throwback to the great oratorio days of Handel called ‘The Dream of Gerontius.’ I fell in love immediately. It is a massive choral work, a little like the fever dream it is based on. Trust me again—it is wonderful.
The book ‘Gerontius’ has nothing to do with the music. The conceit would be: here are the imagined dreams of Elgar during his mysterious trip up the Amazon. The trip was real – and atypical for a Victorian composer who was completely staid in his home life. It’s a great idea. But esoteric to the point of boredom. Sometimes ‘literature’ can be dull. I’ll keep the music active and shelve the book.
September 6, 2014
I'm reading this now after enjoying the Fernet Branca trilogy so much. Completely different voice in this superb novel of 1923 journey by composer Elgar to Amazon River/Brazil. The descriptions reminded me of Ann Patchett's STATE OF WONDER, but GERONTIUS is more masterful.
July 23, 2025
Because the synopsis on GR is so ridiculously reductive I provide the one from the flyleaf of the 1989 hardback edition from Macmillian:
'In November of 1923, RMS Hildebrand put out from the port of Liverpool on a round-trip voyage across four thousand miles of the broad Atlantic to the coast of Brazil and up the Amazon river as far as Manaos.
'The passenger in deluxe Cabin no. 2 was booked aboard for the round trip. He was a portly man in his sixty-seventh year, with a microscope in his capacious luggage and dog gairs on his otherwise immaculate trouser cuffs.
'Sir Edward Elgar, OM, the celebrated composer of 'Land of Hope and Glory', the very embodiment of 'The Spirit of England', was taking a holiday. But the journal that he wrote alone in his cabin revealed a very different man from the public imagining.
'He has written no music of significance since the cello concerto of 1919. Those 'friends pictured within' his 'Enigma Variations' of more than two decades before were now ghosts of sad memory. He has seen the world he knew swept away by the Great War against the Germany of his revered Beethoven and Schumann. The boy who had listened to the song of the wind in the reeds on Severn side had grown old, as 'Gerontius' had grown old.
'As the Hildebrand steamed upriver into a primeval landscape that brought to mind 'The Lost World' of Conan Doyle, Edward Elgar was on his way to an unexpected meeting with a woman from his past, the woman he had identified only as '***' at the head of his thirteenth variation on an original theme...
'James Hamilton-Paterson's 'Gerontius' is fiction on a musical theme of a rare and remarkable order. Starting from a little-known historical voyage it creates a vivid and incisive portrait of the music-maker and dreamer of dreams who endures as England's greatest composer.'
That is considerably better but I suggest you also read the review at: https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_s..., and the profile of the author at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... and I can't resist quoting the following from the Boston Review:
"...Gerontius(1989), which James Hynes, writing in these pages, called "one of the most insightful meditations on the life of the artist since Death in Venice,"...is Hamilton-Paterson's masterpiece. Gerontius is essentially plotless, like so much of the best literature. It needs no plot. It's the oldest story, the story of a journey, "there and back again"—inner, as well as outer.
"The journeying hero is Sir Edward Elgar, England's greatest musician since Purcell, composer of the eponymous oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, among other things, including the majestic Enigma Variations and those old, graduation ceremony warhorses, the Pomp and Circumstance marches. In the novel, it is 1923 and widowed sixty-six-year-old Elgar is taking a ship to the Amazon. Elgar actually made such a voyage, yet nothing is known about his trip: the ideal point of departure for a novelist's imagination. Now, for a novelist successfully to use a composer as the hero of a novel, given the novel's unavoidable scrutiny of a character's soul and thoughts, is a tour de force in itself, and Hamilton-Paterson brings it off with flair. He is clearly not only a music-lover and knowledgeable to his fingertips (much of his work alludes to music, notably his short-story collection The Music, whose ten stories are all variations on a musical theme), but he evidently did his homework, too, and talked to composers, or read up on them—or is one himself, combining literature and composition like that other eminent expatriate and master stylist, the late Anthony Burgess. In any case, in Gerontius his evocation of the composer's art, and its genesis, rings true.
"'Already at this moment of the first sketch he placed the hairpins of crescendos and diminuendos, the characteristic tenutos over notes he wanted stressed, the detailed dynamics which always were as much a part of what he heard as the notes themselves. On impulse he added a third stave above the other two halfway down the page and scrawled Tenor above it: there was suddenly the sound of a voice but he could not hear the words.'
"On impulse": yes, that rings true as a description of the way a composer works. And of course he could not hear the words at first: all is sound, like the waves of the sea. Insights of comparable force are scattered throughout the novel and render Elgar the composer entirely believable. Moreover, Elgar the artist becomes a memorable figure, a bristling, arrogant, yet deeply vulnerable and essentially decent man to whom life has dealt the usual contrapuntal series of insults and plaudits, the latter—fame, relative wealth, the Order of Merit—a little too late to make a difference.
"'Ten or fifteen years earlier my honours could have come as encouragement; as it was they fell into my life with the dead weight of full stops.'
"In writing about Elgar's relations with his fellow-passengers (the ship: classic setting for the human tragicomedy) Hamilton-Paterson evokes the skittering, self-conscious, hypersensitive pride of the artist as well as, if not better than, any other writer since—as Hynes suggests—Thomas Mann. Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, too, comes to mind, and Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe. Love is remembered, half-invoked, regretted, and finally stashed away with everything else on memory's dusty shelves. In the end, after an unexpected encounter in Manaus (sic) with a long-lost (but not forgotten) love, Elgar returns to rainy England, perhaps a little sadder, but certainly a little wiser. It's a lovely, elegiac tale. Is there a flaw? Of course, pace Randall Jarrell's description of a novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." At times I found Elgar's self-criticisms less than convincing. There's too much of that upper-middle-class deprecation in him, too much fashionable late-twentieth-century Weltschmerz—too much Hamilton-Paterson and not enough Elgar, who was, after all, a celebrated Englishman at the zenith of Empire, and probably not given to nihilistic self-consciousness on the subject of himself:
"'Well, finally it seems I've wasted my life….Suddenly on the bridge this morning I felt the flimsiness of all my substance, but not so much because I'd missed something. Quite the contrary—it was because of something of which I've had all too much: myself.'
"or his art:
"'I doubt it ever occurs to people who are not cursed with this 'urge to create' (whatever that is) how, far from living in sublime communion with one's Muse, one grows thoroughly to hate her.'
"The reductive aside "whatever that is" is pure anomie du jour, decidedly more existentialist than Edwardian. Indeed, Hamilton-Paterson admits elsewhere (in Three Miles Down) that his Elgar character is merely himself "disguised as a man of sixty-six." And it is this infusion of self-topicality that weakens the character. Still, taken as a whole—as a meditation on the life of a composer, as well as a tone poem in prose and as an account of the artist's life—Gerontius is a lyrical tale of great originality."
After all that what can I say that is not superfluous. Search out this fine novel by one of the least recognised but finest writers of English alive today.
'In November of 1923, RMS Hildebrand put out from the port of Liverpool on a round-trip voyage across four thousand miles of the broad Atlantic to the coast of Brazil and up the Amazon river as far as Manaos.
'The passenger in deluxe Cabin no. 2 was booked aboard for the round trip. He was a portly man in his sixty-seventh year, with a microscope in his capacious luggage and dog gairs on his otherwise immaculate trouser cuffs.
'Sir Edward Elgar, OM, the celebrated composer of 'Land of Hope and Glory', the very embodiment of 'The Spirit of England', was taking a holiday. But the journal that he wrote alone in his cabin revealed a very different man from the public imagining.
'He has written no music of significance since the cello concerto of 1919. Those 'friends pictured within' his 'Enigma Variations' of more than two decades before were now ghosts of sad memory. He has seen the world he knew swept away by the Great War against the Germany of his revered Beethoven and Schumann. The boy who had listened to the song of the wind in the reeds on Severn side had grown old, as 'Gerontius' had grown old.
'As the Hildebrand steamed upriver into a primeval landscape that brought to mind 'The Lost World' of Conan Doyle, Edward Elgar was on his way to an unexpected meeting with a woman from his past, the woman he had identified only as '***' at the head of his thirteenth variation on an original theme...
'James Hamilton-Paterson's 'Gerontius' is fiction on a musical theme of a rare and remarkable order. Starting from a little-known historical voyage it creates a vivid and incisive portrait of the music-maker and dreamer of dreams who endures as England's greatest composer.'
That is considerably better but I suggest you also read the review at: https://www.heraldscotland.com/life_s..., and the profile of the author at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/200... and I can't resist quoting the following from the Boston Review:
"...Gerontius(1989), which James Hynes, writing in these pages, called "one of the most insightful meditations on the life of the artist since Death in Venice,"...is Hamilton-Paterson's masterpiece. Gerontius is essentially plotless, like so much of the best literature. It needs no plot. It's the oldest story, the story of a journey, "there and back again"—inner, as well as outer.
"The journeying hero is Sir Edward Elgar, England's greatest musician since Purcell, composer of the eponymous oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, among other things, including the majestic Enigma Variations and those old, graduation ceremony warhorses, the Pomp and Circumstance marches. In the novel, it is 1923 and widowed sixty-six-year-old Elgar is taking a ship to the Amazon. Elgar actually made such a voyage, yet nothing is known about his trip: the ideal point of departure for a novelist's imagination. Now, for a novelist successfully to use a composer as the hero of a novel, given the novel's unavoidable scrutiny of a character's soul and thoughts, is a tour de force in itself, and Hamilton-Paterson brings it off with flair. He is clearly not only a music-lover and knowledgeable to his fingertips (much of his work alludes to music, notably his short-story collection The Music, whose ten stories are all variations on a musical theme), but he evidently did his homework, too, and talked to composers, or read up on them—or is one himself, combining literature and composition like that other eminent expatriate and master stylist, the late Anthony Burgess. In any case, in Gerontius his evocation of the composer's art, and its genesis, rings true.
"'Already at this moment of the first sketch he placed the hairpins of crescendos and diminuendos, the characteristic tenutos over notes he wanted stressed, the detailed dynamics which always were as much a part of what he heard as the notes themselves. On impulse he added a third stave above the other two halfway down the page and scrawled Tenor above it: there was suddenly the sound of a voice but he could not hear the words.'
"On impulse": yes, that rings true as a description of the way a composer works. And of course he could not hear the words at first: all is sound, like the waves of the sea. Insights of comparable force are scattered throughout the novel and render Elgar the composer entirely believable. Moreover, Elgar the artist becomes a memorable figure, a bristling, arrogant, yet deeply vulnerable and essentially decent man to whom life has dealt the usual contrapuntal series of insults and plaudits, the latter—fame, relative wealth, the Order of Merit—a little too late to make a difference.
"'Ten or fifteen years earlier my honours could have come as encouragement; as it was they fell into my life with the dead weight of full stops.'
"In writing about Elgar's relations with his fellow-passengers (the ship: classic setting for the human tragicomedy) Hamilton-Paterson evokes the skittering, self-conscious, hypersensitive pride of the artist as well as, if not better than, any other writer since—as Hynes suggests—Thomas Mann. Joyce's Stephen Daedalus, too, comes to mind, and Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe. Love is remembered, half-invoked, regretted, and finally stashed away with everything else on memory's dusty shelves. In the end, after an unexpected encounter in Manaus (sic) with a long-lost (but not forgotten) love, Elgar returns to rainy England, perhaps a little sadder, but certainly a little wiser. It's a lovely, elegiac tale. Is there a flaw? Of course, pace Randall Jarrell's description of a novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." At times I found Elgar's self-criticisms less than convincing. There's too much of that upper-middle-class deprecation in him, too much fashionable late-twentieth-century Weltschmerz—too much Hamilton-Paterson and not enough Elgar, who was, after all, a celebrated Englishman at the zenith of Empire, and probably not given to nihilistic self-consciousness on the subject of himself:
"'Well, finally it seems I've wasted my life….Suddenly on the bridge this morning I felt the flimsiness of all my substance, but not so much because I'd missed something. Quite the contrary—it was because of something of which I've had all too much: myself.'
"or his art:
"'I doubt it ever occurs to people who are not cursed with this 'urge to create' (whatever that is) how, far from living in sublime communion with one's Muse, one grows thoroughly to hate her.'
"The reductive aside "whatever that is" is pure anomie du jour, decidedly more existentialist than Edwardian. Indeed, Hamilton-Paterson admits elsewhere (in Three Miles Down) that his Elgar character is merely himself "disguised as a man of sixty-six." And it is this infusion of self-topicality that weakens the character. Still, taken as a whole—as a meditation on the life of a composer, as well as a tone poem in prose and as an account of the artist's life—Gerontius is a lyrical tale of great originality."
After all that what can I say that is not superfluous. Search out this fine novel by one of the least recognised but finest writers of English alive today.
March 26, 2009
What a wonderful book this is, generous, thoughtful, unsentimental in its attitude towards creativity and value. It tells the story of a trip to the Amazon made by Elgar when he was 63, and if that puts you off, you'll miss an exceptionally stimulating read. The only reason I haven't give it five stars is that it's not quite as good as the same author's Loving Monsters
November 28, 2024
Superb writing, but the protagonist is so thoroughly unappealing.
January 21, 2008
this great fantasy bit at the start about a tiki dwelling at the top of a cliff standing in gumboots with wings of steel feathers neck of tangerine whatever its fantastic then splutters into the amazon and discovery travel & vicarious living travelogue
January 28, 2009
Interesting concept - certainly hits the 'prickly' Elgar nail on the head, but inevitably much conjecture. Would an elderly Elgar really travel down a mountain on a sled?
March 15, 2019
Fact - towards the end of his life, Sir Edward Elgar (whose music I love) took a cruise to Brazil, to Manaos (known for its opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle).
Fiction - everything else.
Almost nothing is known about Elgar's cruise. What is known is that his wife had died and he composed nothing more for the rest of his life, though he did conduct and make recordings. We also know that he was a depressive by nature.
From this, James Hamilton-Paterson has woven a story. Elgar travels across the ocean, accompanied by "his instruments" which the steward assumes is a trombone or some such, but is in fact a microscope. Elgar becomes quite friendly with Steward Pyce through getting him to obtain samples of sea-water so he can study plankton under his microscope.
When Elgar gets to Manaos, he has an encounter with someone from his youth, who "tells it as it is" and tries to help him to see his way through the depression and sense of complete failure, which unfortunately dogs him throughout the book.
I must admit I became impatient with him - I expect in these days he would be diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness like burnout, but his determination to pass himself off to the world as a waste of space became insufferable as we travel through the story. He both wants fame and is disgusted by it - and as he says, "An artist is on his own. He's stuck up a tower preaching to pigs, no matter that now and then they'll pretend to listen and even to applaud. But don't be deceived. They soon get tired of rattling their trotters at you and wander off to find someone more diverting. After that they'd cut you down as soon as look at you."
This type of rant unfortunately was what spoiled the book for me. I ended up feeling frustrated with the man who blessed the world with "The Dream of Gerontius" (together with Newman) as well as "Nimrod" and the Cello Concerto. How could he write that and see himself as a failure? Was not the failure with the people who preferred Schoenberg or Stravinsky? (And which composer gets more air-time now, I ask?)
If you're an Elgarian, you will want to read this book - but it might be wise to resist the temptation.
Fiction - everything else.
Almost nothing is known about Elgar's cruise. What is known is that his wife had died and he composed nothing more for the rest of his life, though he did conduct and make recordings. We also know that he was a depressive by nature.
From this, James Hamilton-Paterson has woven a story. Elgar travels across the ocean, accompanied by "his instruments" which the steward assumes is a trombone or some such, but is in fact a microscope. Elgar becomes quite friendly with Steward Pyce through getting him to obtain samples of sea-water so he can study plankton under his microscope.
When Elgar gets to Manaos, he has an encounter with someone from his youth, who "tells it as it is" and tries to help him to see his way through the depression and sense of complete failure, which unfortunately dogs him throughout the book.
I must admit I became impatient with him - I expect in these days he would be diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness like burnout, but his determination to pass himself off to the world as a waste of space became insufferable as we travel through the story. He both wants fame and is disgusted by it - and as he says, "An artist is on his own. He's stuck up a tower preaching to pigs, no matter that now and then they'll pretend to listen and even to applaud. But don't be deceived. They soon get tired of rattling their trotters at you and wander off to find someone more diverting. After that they'd cut you down as soon as look at you."
This type of rant unfortunately was what spoiled the book for me. I ended up feeling frustrated with the man who blessed the world with "The Dream of Gerontius" (together with Newman) as well as "Nimrod" and the Cello Concerto. How could he write that and see himself as a failure? Was not the failure with the people who preferred Schoenberg or Stravinsky? (And which composer gets more air-time now, I ask?)
If you're an Elgarian, you will want to read this book - but it might be wise to resist the temptation.
March 1, 2018
James Hamilton-Paterson has used Sir Edward Elgar's trip to South America in 1923 as an opportunity to explore the character of the composer as he reflects on his life and contemplates the future.
Elgar's six week trip to South America and the Amazon is a little known episode in the composer's later life and this has allowed the author to create a biographical fictional account of the journey. Elgar is portrayed as a grumpy, disillusioned man suffering in the aftermath of his wife's death and feeling that his career has been a waste of time. He does not want to discuss music and is much more interested in using his microscope to examine the water from around the cruiser. In South America he is delighted to discover that the Anglican vicar is much more interested in moths than in anything else and they share a morning peering at moths through Elgar's microscope. On the trip Elgar avoids those who might regard him as the 'grand old man' and becomes friendly only with those who offer him more honest open relationships.
In South America he meets Lena, a German woman who had been a close companion in his early days. Together in several difficult conversations they reflect on what might have been and how their separate lives have developed, with Lena privately critical of him and in public keen to emphasise how even the marvellous things he has created may be lost over time.
There is an air of melancholy in the novel in the character of Elgar and his view of his life. We see how he has come to regard his work as meaningless and he looks forward with some despair to the years ahead.
Elgar's six week trip to South America and the Amazon is a little known episode in the composer's later life and this has allowed the author to create a biographical fictional account of the journey. Elgar is portrayed as a grumpy, disillusioned man suffering in the aftermath of his wife's death and feeling that his career has been a waste of time. He does not want to discuss music and is much more interested in using his microscope to examine the water from around the cruiser. In South America he is delighted to discover that the Anglican vicar is much more interested in moths than in anything else and they share a morning peering at moths through Elgar's microscope. On the trip Elgar avoids those who might regard him as the 'grand old man' and becomes friendly only with those who offer him more honest open relationships.
In South America he meets Lena, a German woman who had been a close companion in his early days. Together in several difficult conversations they reflect on what might have been and how their separate lives have developed, with Lena privately critical of him and in public keen to emphasise how even the marvellous things he has created may be lost over time.
There is an air of melancholy in the novel in the character of Elgar and his view of his life. We see how he has come to regard his work as meaningless and he looks forward with some despair to the years ahead.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 13, 2019
Although this is a work of fiction, it feels well researched and presents Elgar in an interesting and believable way. As much as anything it is a book about ageing, the decline of passionate interest and curiosity and the melancholy business of looking back. I was fascinated by the musing on “longing “ - an unsettling feeling that can accompany us throughout life, a yearning for something we cannot discern.
I have been inspired to listen to Elgar’s music with different ears. The book suggests that British patriotism was certainly not his intention and his inspiration came from the great German composers, especially Schumann.
An interesting read.
I have been inspired to listen to Elgar’s music with different ears. The book suggests that British patriotism was certainly not his intention and his inspiration came from the great German composers, especially Schumann.
An interesting read.
February 13, 2021
I can’t quite make up my mind whether or not one needs to be an Elgar buff to enjoy this. On balance, perhaps not. It is a nicely drawn shapshot of the English of a certain class and era abroad. It opened up a culture of travel that I barely knew existed: board a ship in Liverpool and cross the Atlantic before navigating miles up the Amazon inland to Manaus. Remarkable. The book beautifully evokes the sights and aromas of the voyage.
But for the Elgar buff this is a fascinating book, full of knowing nods and surprises for those who love the music but perhaps knew less of the man. Of course this is fictional. But there is real plausibility here. And the coup de theatre towards the end is super!
But for the Elgar buff this is a fascinating book, full of knowing nods and surprises for those who love the music but perhaps knew less of the man. Of course this is fictional. But there is real plausibility here. And the coup de theatre towards the end is super!
February 11, 2018
Historical fiction based on the life of Sir Edward Elgar, an English composer born in 1857; his Pomp and Circumstance is played every year as part of the British Proms. Edward is 66 years old; out of the blue, he decides to take a trip to the Amazon; about this trip, very little is known, a blank slate for Hamilton-Paterson. The time is November, 1923. Edward had imagined an adventure, an escape from his life, as he boarded the Hildebrand. At his prime, married and settled, Sir Elgar was famous and respected but worried about making ends meet; rather than seeing himself as an artist, he saw creating music as making a living. At 66, his thoughts linger on death and aging and the trajectory of his life - was it good, was he successful, did he do enough? He ponders on loneliness - to create, he needed to be alone, to be in his head, and now he's alone in physical way - his wife, his friends, his king are all dead. The artist who makes a living creating art might consider the public's taste and find himself or herself distracted by public opinion. When an artist creates and the public takes away something other than what was intended, is this an accurate posterity? To want to be one of the greats, to create music that will be passed down through generations - what an rare accomplishment, esp taking into account changing tastes and society's desire for something new and fresh! He clearly had the ability to move people, to evoke emotion, and that is power indeed. Elgar is crotchety - he complains that everyone wants to speak to him about music while he'd rather speak of something else and then goes back to his berth and writes about music. The women in the book seem to have the clearest understanding of him, of his childish love/hate relationship w/ praise and fame.
Elgar wrote a composition based on "The Dream of Gerontius," a poem written by John Henry Newman, which is the prayer of a dying man as he approaches death and as he passes over and his soul is judged; as a soul (with all his senses except sight) he passes through Judgement w/ his guardian angel. In Hamilton-Paterson's account, Elgar decided to set Gerontius to music because of this line, "I cannot of music rightly say / Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones," rather than the assumed religious reasons, this idea that all art stems from one source (the individual's interactions with the world), and it the individual artist's special sense - some hear, some see. I wonder now if Molly Air, a young friend Elgar made on the journey, with her interesting surname, is his Guardian Angel? She was one of the wisest individuals on the ship, self aware and conscious of the motivations of other passengers.
I would hazard a guess that this book won the Whitbread Prize because of the amazing depth of character development. In its introspection the book feels like a nod to the pre-modernists, like George Eliot.
Elgar wrote a composition based on "The Dream of Gerontius," a poem written by John Henry Newman, which is the prayer of a dying man as he approaches death and as he passes over and his soul is judged; as a soul (with all his senses except sight) he passes through Judgement w/ his guardian angel. In Hamilton-Paterson's account, Elgar decided to set Gerontius to music because of this line, "I cannot of music rightly say / Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones," rather than the assumed religious reasons, this idea that all art stems from one source (the individual's interactions with the world), and it the individual artist's special sense - some hear, some see. I wonder now if Molly Air, a young friend Elgar made on the journey, with her interesting surname, is his Guardian Angel? She was one of the wisest individuals on the ship, self aware and conscious of the motivations of other passengers.
I would hazard a guess that this book won the Whitbread Prize because of the amazing depth of character development. In its introspection the book feels like a nod to the pre-modernists, like George Eliot.
October 1, 2013
Rather wonderful. Elgar's mysterious and largely undocumented Amazon cruise is a gift for an imaginative writer like Mr Hamilton Paterson and he doesn't mess up the opportunity. There are rich and colourful descriptions of cruise life in the early 1920s and of life in Manaos and Cape Verde. There are also lengthy reflections of a successful composer nearing the end of his life and rather resenting his celebrity status.
It's an absorbing read and recommended for any fans of Mr H-P and for lovers of evocative, descriptive writing in general. I wasn't surprised to find it won awards when it was published. For me it's one of those "miss your station" books which allow you to forget you're actually reading a book and simply absorb the story.
The only fly in the ointment is a couple of slightly tedious tirades against Elgar and his work towards the end, hence my four star review.
And it almost completely lacks the acerbic wit of the "Gerald Stamper" books though it's no less good for that. I picked it up as the library didn't have "Rancid Pansies". Maybe next time.
It's an absorbing read and recommended for any fans of Mr H-P and for lovers of evocative, descriptive writing in general. I wasn't surprised to find it won awards when it was published. For me it's one of those "miss your station" books which allow you to forget you're actually reading a book and simply absorb the story.
The only fly in the ointment is a couple of slightly tedious tirades against Elgar and his work towards the end, hence my four star review.
And it almost completely lacks the acerbic wit of the "Gerald Stamper" books though it's no less good for that. I picked it up as the library didn't have "Rancid Pansies". Maybe next time.
February 6, 2014
Impressive, in many ways. The level of knowledge of Elgar is excellent: the journal entries in particular are so characteristic of the way he wrote his letters as is the understanding of Elgar's particular creative process and more generally there's a depth of characterization that's really most convincing. The fleshing out of a plot from a vague and almost unrecorded episode (I'd never heard of this trip to Brazil before coming across this novel) is well conceived. Finally the sheer poetry of the writing is a joy. As a bit of an Elgar nut I expected to hate it and was very pleasantly surprised.
March 30, 2009
Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson (1992)
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August 7, 2011A fictionalized account of a real cruise to the Amazon taken by Sir Edward Elgar when he was 65. Well written and an interesting commentary on genius.
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