The Melody

by Jim Crace

Alfred Busi, famed in his town for his music and songs, is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days in the large villa he has always called home. Then one night Busi is attacked by a creature he disturbs as it raids the contents of his larder. Busi is convinced that what assaulted him was no animal, but a child, `innocent and wild', and his words fan the flames of old rumour - of an ancient race of people living in the bosk surrounding the town - and new controversy: the town's paupers, the feral wastrels at its edges, must be dealt with. Once and for all.
Lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, The Melody by Jim Crace tracks the few days that will see Busi and the town he loves altered irrevocably. This is a story about grief and ageing, about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too - a rallying cry to protect those we persecute.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Music, Contemporary, Novels, British Literature, Adult

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 19, 2018

About the author

James "Jim" Crace is an award-winning English writer. His novel Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Harvest won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award, James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Crace grew up in Forty Hill, an area at the far northern point of Greater London, close to Enfield where Crace attended Enfield Grammar School. He studied for a degree at the Birmingham College of Commerce (now part of Birmingham City University), where he was enrolled as an external student of the University of London. After securing a BA (Hons) in English Literature in 1968, he travelled overseas with the UK organization Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), working in Sudan. Two years later he returned to the UK, and worked with the BBC, writing educational programmes. From 1976 to 1987 he worked as a freelance journalist for The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers.

In 1986 Crace published Continent. Continent won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction Prize. This work was followed by The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine, Being Dead and Six. His most recent novel, The Pesthouse, was published in the UK in March 2007.

Despite living in Britain, Crace is more successful in the United States, as evidenced by the award of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Melody is a bleak satire with a slight hint at parable.
The old and widowed singer and songwriter lives alone in the large dilapidated villa by the sea… One unrestful night he is bitten and badly scratched by some wild creature foraging in his larder…

Very soon, in a second, probably, and at least before the creature’s teeth sank into the right side of his hand and, flesh on flesh, the grip of something wet and warm began its pressure on his throat, Busi knew enough to be quite sure that this creature was a child. A snarling, vicious one, which wanted only to disable him and then escape. The attack would be both resolute and fleeting. Busi was still holding his clouting stick, but he did not try to use it, not even as a lever to prize this animal away, not even when its teeth had latched onto the singer’s cheeks and lips, and its hands – no, actually, its claws – were tearing at his neck.

All the following week troubles and distresses kept falling on him one after another… And he is displeased with the sudden news… He is depressed and miserable… Consequently he fails, first time in his life, to appear at his concert…

None of his explanations, the singer knew, was sufficient to do what he had never done before: fail to honor a concert booking, fail to show up on the stage. He’d performed, outdoors, in thunderstorms, and with a fractured ankle, with malaria, with migraine, with diarrhea, on the day his mother had had a stroke, the day he’d crashed into a horse-drawn cart (the horse had had to be put down, but Busi sang), even on the evening after Alicia’s death, because he’d given his word some months before and he was professional.

Six years passed by… He and his milieu changed… Today is his seventieth birthday… And he wants to celebrate it picnicking in the once wild park of his childhood…

The clearings themselves, where we must park, have not changed much, he says, as we get stiffly from the car at last and stretch ourselves, but they look tamed and managed now and, as ever these days, there is paper litter everywhere, so what you take at first to be an unusual leaf or some wild bloom is just an empty packet of cigars, a scrap of magazine or orange peel. There are barbecue braziers, picnic benches roughly made out of fallen timber, salt licks for the deer and ungulates, overflowing oil cans, supposedly too tall for animals, cemented into the ground for picnickers’ litter and waste, knotted ropes to help any children scale the branches.

Whether we like it or not the world constantly changes and we must accept it and adapt.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Melody by Jim Crace is a 2018 Picador publication.

I honestly do not remember how this book showed up on my radar. In equal honesty, I must admit I have never read anything by this author. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that he has quite a reputation, being shortlisted for the Booker award. However, just because an author wrote an award winning book is no guarantee I’m going to like their work, because, to be honest, the literary world seems to be on an entirely different plane and I often struggle to understand what they saw in a book that was so compelling.

But, the premise of The Melody sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try. However, once I began to read the book, I realized I may have misunderstood the synopsis, and was slightly confused by what was going on. However, I was interested enough to keep reading.

The subject matter here is a little depressing. Our main character, Alfred Busi, is an accomplished musician and pianist. He is going through the twilight of his career, and finds himself struggling with widowhood, and the distressing signs and symptoms of aging. However, Alfred is still getting by on his own, until one evening a loud noise awakens him. When he steps out to investigate, he is attacked by a creature, bitten to be specific. He’s not even sure what bit him- believing it might have been a boy- so hungry and feral he attacked in self-preservation.

Unfortunately, Alfred has to deliver a speech and must go out in public with visible wounds, which catches the interest of a journalist, which sets off a series of events, that upends Alfred quiet life.

The story is relayed to us by an ‘unknown’ narrator, which is very effective, especially if it is done right. This is story of humanity- the reprehensible, those people who don’t want to even acknowledge the poor or homeless, wishing to sweep them under the rug, unseen, and then there are good people- supportive friends who gently and steadfastly wrap themselves around Alfred as he grapples with his life now, without his wife, and the inevitable changes he is helpless to prevent, while refusing to forget those who have been chased away from a selfish, heartless society.

This is not the type of book I normally gravitate towards, but I think the story is very unique and thought provoking. Now that I have been introduced to Jim Crace I just might keep my literary cap on and take a closer look at his other work.

4 stars

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another intriguing, atmospheric and moving novel which justifies Crace's decision to abandon the retirement he announced at the time of Harvest.

Like many of his other books the setting of this one defies being pinned down - all we really know is that it is set in a European city with an Atlantic coast, as all of the other clues seem to be entirely fictional. Other details suggest that the setting is in the past, but again things seem deliberately slippery.

The book is in two parts. In the longer first part an anonymous narrator describes a disastrous week in the life of Alfred Busi ("Mister Al") a recently widowed singer, pianist and songwriter who lives in a run-down villa on a coast adjoining "the bosk", a semi-wild area of trees and shrubland. He is attacked in his home by what he believes to be a naked feral child who has been raiding his larder. His house is also being targeted by his nephew's property development scheme. This section is very strong on both grief and the indignities of ageing.

The second section takes place several years later and is narrated by a lodger in the new development that has replaced the villa, who has befriended Busi, allowing this section to end on a more redemptive note.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I've only read a few of his books, Crace's last one, 2013's 'Harvest', was my favorite to win that year's Booker Prize (alas, it didn't!), and I was saddened to learn he was planning to retire from writing and there would be no new Crace novels. Lucky for us, he decided against that plan and we now have his lovely, elegiac twelfth novel ... something akin to Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' in that it both recapitulates and sums up much of what had gone before, through the wise eyes of an elderly man coming to grips with mortality.

The story is rather simple ... it details a few days in the life of an unnamed town's celebrated citizen, one Alfred Busi, a renowned singer who is to be given a statue commemorating his career in the Avenue of Fame, with an accompanying farewell concert. The day before he is to be honored, he is attacked in his kitchen larder, by what he insists might be a feral child living in 'the bosk', a forested wilderness adjoining the town. He also learns his nefarious nephew is planning to knock down Busi's lifelong residence in favor of luxury condos. Busi's adjustment to these two encumbrances is Crace's contemplative means of addressing many of society's current ills in the post Brexit/Trump universe. Hopefully there will be additional entries to the Crace canon - but if not, he has certainly left us with one of the crowning achievements of his own illustrious career.

My sincere thanks to Netgalley and Doubleday for providing me with an ARC of this book a full 7 months prior to publication, in exchange for this honest review.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

He teased a phrase that might reveal a melody, if he worked on it. Would he find the energy to work on it. He hadn’t written anything worthwhile for a year and more, so why continue now

Jim Crace’s previous novel was the outstanding Harvest, which he announced at the time as his last novel. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Booker (which in my view it should have won) and for the inaugural 2013 Goldsmith (where it came up against the literary phenomenon that was A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing).

However two years later, it went on to win the 2015 International Dublin Literary award. That award, which starts with nominations from public libraries around the world, is renowned both for the breadth and depth of its extensive longlist (for example 150 books in 2018) and for its extensive prize money (Euros 100,000 or for translated books Euros 75,000 to the author and Euros 25,000 to the translator) – to which literature owes a debt.

Daniel Hahn, translator of the 2017 winner, A General Theory of Oblivion, very admirably used some of his winnings to establish the TA First Translation Prize.

For Crace the money from the various prizes effectively lead to him reconsidering his retirement from fiction Prize money is not for spending on a cruise or golf club membership. It’s supposed to pay for more books, so the puritan in me said I owed the prizes a novel.

The genesis of the novel he produced is explained on his website, and is worth reproducing at length:

My novels .. tend to spring from something puzzling or troubling beyond my experience a About three years ago, I was on the tenth floor of a lavish hotel in Chennai, India … .. everything was perfect – except for one annoyance: I couldn’t sleep because of the ceaseless, metallic racket from the waste ground below my suite. I looked down from the window on my first restless night to watch the hotel’s garbage bins being toppled over and raided for food scraps by, mostly, feral dogs and a few other animals I couldn’t, in that half-light, put a name to. A couple of them looked alarmingly like children ……….. what I’d witnessed at the bins had been a distressing and sobering sight, not just because of the disparity between my pampered life and theirs but also because it made me speculate from my elevated viewpoint how biologically debasing and destructive poverty must be. ….. That was the seed for the novel and it provided the question the narrative would hope to answer: What occupies the space between the human mammals in their hotel rooms and those amongst the bins? A realist, autobiographical writer …. might have set the novel in 21st century Chennai. I was wary of that … whatever I wrote would seem like a narrow, judgemental, post-colonial misrepresentation. … there were plenty of talented Indian writers who would make a truer job of it than I ever could. … that meant making up an unnamed nation of my own, something I am very fond of doing …… The Melody is set in a time long lost (the late 1920s, say), on a coast unnamed (by the Mediterranean, perhaps) and in a town unbuilt, except within the pages of the novel.

And the Melody opens with the scene that inspired it. Alfred Busi, a recently widowed famous (within the town) musician, composer and singer, is disturbed, as he is often is, by animals from the nearby woodland (bosk) foraging in his bins, but when investigating is assaulted by a creature that has raided his larder, a creature he is convinced is a wild, human child.

His account of the evening is sensationalised by a local journalist who links the story to an alleged crime wave carried out by the homeless and disposed of the town; his article in turn being embellished by an inflammatory interview with Alfred’s nephew (son of his wife’s sister), a rapacious property developer, who uses the word Neanderthals to link the homeless, dog-whistle style, to a local legend of sub-humans living in the bosk.

Alfred feels inspired to stand up for the poor and homeless – who are increasingly being oppressed by the businessman of the town; albeit his resolution tested when the same weekend, he is robbed and beaten while walking in the area where they stay during the day (an area which they are cleared from at night). He also finds to his horror that his nephew is planning a scheme to demolish his beloved villa (and clear the bosk of its animal inhabitants) and replace it with a huge development.

The book itself proceeds at a gentle pace, written in the third person (but with an initially unnamed second party plural narrator) following the thoughts (which later turn out to be second hand reminiscences) of Alfred, but also his sister-in-law, a student who lives next door to his villa and even the journalist (it is less clear how the narrator has access to these). At the same time, Crace sketches a convincing and often beautiful picture of: Alfred’s oeuvre; of the ageing of an artist and a man (his repertoire was like his sex life nowadays, retrospective, elderly; and of the life, customs , legends and geography of the town, a fictional portrait which carries over into the epigraph and acknowledgements.

The book also gives a beautiful portrait of widowerhood, especially widowerhood following a lengthy and loving marriage.

This is not a book with any clear narrative drive or resolution – the unknown narrator for example has to explain their link to the story (and it really adds little) and there are elements that I felt did not really add to the story (for example the lack of an “o” on the journalist’s typewriter).

I also felt that the macro-themes of the book (capitalism, exploitation and the brutalising effects of poverty) were treated in what was often an unsubtle way (a muckraking journalist, greedy businessmen clearing out old houses and wilderness for soulless developments) which sat oddly alongside the subtlety of the micro-writing.

But Crace remains a brilliant writer, and if this book does not hit the heights of “Harvest” there is still much to like in it.

Busi knew his .. voice of late had lost some of its caverns and peaks. Age had weakened and reduced it … But what he missed in range, he’s gained in craft

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is only my second experience of Jim Crace’s work. My first was Harvest which really should have won The Man Booker Prize (even though I really like The Luminaries that did win that year). After reading The Melody, I certainly won’t be stopping at just two of his books: I imagine I will be adding all of the rest to my TBR pile.

Crace lulls you into a false sense of security. He peppers his works with seemingly realist detail. It is only when you realise that most of it is invented that he sort of pulls the rug from under your feet. He quotes Mondazy again and again, who doesn’t exist. People drink Boulevard Liqueur, which doesn’t exist. And so on. I read somewhere that this is often referred to a Crace-land. The acknowledgements at the end of the book are mostly invented.

The Melody is set in an unnamed town (the final acknowledgement reads "I also ought to thank the people of" at which point the book has no more content) that feels like it might be somewhere in the Mediterranean (or possibly somewhere else) and it might be about 100 years ago (although possibly a completely different time - I am purely guessing based on people being sent to Ellis Island to go to America). It faces the ocean and behind it is the "bosk". No, I don’t know either. But the text makes it clear that means a sort of wilderness area.

Alfred Busi is an ageing singer, a widower, famous and about to be honoured by this unnamed town where he has lived all his life. He is used to foraging noises from his backyard but one night when he goes to investigate, he is attacked by a strange creature, presumably one of the wild inhabitants of the bosk. This sets us up for a book that is, simultaneously, a lament for lost love and a political commentary on the battle between rich and poor. Busi is lamenting the loss of his wife and the book's title comes from the tune he works on based on the sound of the Persian bells that sound each time his larder is opened and which he associates with his wife’s midnight snacks. In parallel, the other "melody" is the clashing of rubbish bins as the poor forage for food. The town wrestles with the problem of what to do with its poor people as developers, including Busi’s nephew, seek to demolish Busi's house and the surrounding area where the undesirables live.

You have to keep your wits about you as you read. The book’s narrator, who does eventually reveal himself, addresses us as readers as if we are familiar with the locality and refers to events as if he assumes we know about them. The narrative is tricky with tense: there’s a particular passage where Busi has a dream which "he would be retelling" in "less than an hour" that is about concert-goers "elated by the music they had heard" at one of his future concerts, if he had actually turned up. At the same time, Crace often has a wonderful turn of phrase that makes reading the book a real pleasure.

It’s a compelling mixture of personal grief and community politics. It makes a far more subtle but similar call for environmental conservation to that in The Overstory by Richard Powers. It challenges us about how we behave towards those who are different to us in our community.

A beautiful book. 4.5 stars. I seriously thought about 5 stars and may go back there after it has time to settle with me.

[Doug H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the misleading description and bland art on its dust jacket, this is one of the better books I’ve read this year. Don’t expect a thriller about a lost human tribe clashing with modern man and don’t expect an activistic polemic on the plight of the poor. Do expect a meditation on widowerhood, aging, and the culmination of a career in the arts. As always with Crace, the approach is highly creative, allegorical and philosophical. Meditative and Literary with capital M’s and L’s. Sometimes his writing reminds me of Coetzee, but less didactic and much less focused on his own penis.

4.5 stars.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 3 out of 5]

*** Update*** re- read for Waterstones Book club February 2019.

I love revisiting novels, and the opportunity to read a story without having to worry about plot and outcomes, invariably increases my appreciation and enjoyment of the book.

Melody proved to be an exception to this. I continue to make allowances for Jim Crace’s whimsical style, and his deliberate silliness and inventiveness. Take some bits of the story seriously, but otherwise enjoy the pure fantasy of the ‘cant be real’.

Alas, this time through I was much more aware that I found all the characters (one exception-Terina) much too slight and inconsequential. Cedric, the pianist, Soubriquet, the journalist, and Lexxx, the eco warrior, had cameo appearances that did nothing to enliven our leaden protagonist Alfred Bosi.

I was much more aware of the book’s division into two parts, and found part two silly and unnecessary. There’s the tying up of loose ends with a hotch potch of ancillary characters.

I did work out the identity of the second half narrator, and sometimes third party observer in Part 1 (not something I’ve seen or heard discussed elsewhere)......

on Bosi's attack in Mendicant Gardens:
”the other pair (of shoes) were gleaming new.. Bosi stared at them and wondered at their unseemly cleanliness”(129)
In Part 2 the narrator declares:
”here among the trees, an unaccommodating world, unsuitable for highly polished shoes like mine”

So it was the narrator, now nicely ensconced in Bosi's new modern development, who was part of the attack on Bosi in Mendicant Gardens!!!”

but even this reveal sat uncomfortably with me trying to make some meaningful sense of the world of social injustice, and septuagenarian old age

It’s rather nice to come across an author who makes a virtue of totally made - up references and small asides to embellish a story. Jim Crace is such an inventor of fantasy and an avowed defender of pure make belief.
It works very well in The Melody, my first experience of Crace, as an offset to more serious and real life message, summed up by our main protagonist, Alfred Bosi:
“No amount of luck prepares you for the loneliness of old age”(228)
Bosi is an elderly music composer, recently widowed, lonely, and subject to the reality of physical weakness and the possibility of not being able to defend oneself. It’s a sad story, and literature focused on people of a pensionable age is not heavily populated.
Throw in another reality, and another fear - grasping relations and the greedy eyes assessing your worldly assets, and it’s a deeply reflective book offset by the Crace foibles, as our author tosses in his flights of fancy.
I liked the book, and I like Jim Crace’s writing style. Crace himself is a septuagenarian and the sense of life in older age is well expressed.

I had the chance to hear Jim Crace in conversation with Jon McGregor at the British Library (May 2018), and he mused about The Melody, and his writing style:

Crace regards himself as an “old fashioned” writer and points to a time before Jane Austen (‘the literature game changer’) when stories were larger than life. In the google search age Crace has been subject to the “accusation” that “he has simply made it up”!!
It’s a strange accusation he reflects for a fiction writer! He told a great anecdote about Harvest in which Crace belatedly changed a timeline in the nearly finished manuscript, and had to create a “type of green vellum” in order to fit into the timeline. The new vellum took a week, rather than a year, to cure.
On the subject of fantasy Crace rued the lack of success and recognition deserved by B.S.Johnson who missed out on “greatness” because his novels were lies!

Crace referred to the influence of booksellers when I asked him about the (perfectly pleasant, but anodyne) cover of The Melody. Not his choice, not the alternative offered, but a compromise reached after the Waterstones buying reps put in their thoughts and wishes!

The Melody is a gentle, rather sad story written by a most approachable likeable author

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I feel bad about this one: I finished this novel months ago, right when Covid-19 suddenly and completely disrupted my life (lockdown, switch to online instruction, and all the rest) and I just couldn't focus on writing a GR review, even a short one. Too much going on, too much uncertainty. Anyway, Crace's novel is now too far away from me to say anything insightful, other than this is probably my least favorite Crace novel (I'm a pretty big fan and have read most of his work). Crace's fiction is always enigmatic and challenging (particularly in forcing you to see askew what's generally understood and accepted). That's cool. That's invigorating. This novel, however, might just be too enigmatic, at least that's how it seemed to me way back when when I finished it. Perhaps that's because when I read it Covid-19 was already making everything askew enough--wbo needed more queering of everyday life, more anxiety arising from that disruption and reconfiguring?

If I have the time and energy (doubtful for the immediate future), I may return to this novel and give it another chance and say something more enlightening about it. But for now, what you've just read (if you've got this far) is all I'm capable of. Sigh.

Y'all stay safe and healthy in these scary times.

[Bandit · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm convinced I really missed the boat on this one. In fact there's a definitely cognitive dissonance between the intriguing premise and the dense lifeless book I read. Did I not recognize the allegorical condemnation of xenophobia? Did I not appreciate the meditation on grief and aging this novel was? Did I not care for the supposed cleverness of it all? Well, f*ck, guess I did not. Probably was too busy staying awake to get through the pages. I wanted to like it, I was interested to try out the much lauded author, whose last book nearly got the prestigious Man Booker prize. But this was just tedious. Well written from a technical perspective, but unbearably dense, all narration, nary a line of dialogue, story of an aging crooner who was attacked by something/someone, which sets his neighborhood agog. That's about it, there's a bunch of characters I didn't really care about and a few events that elicited about the same amount of emotional investment. In fact, the only thing gotten out of this entire reading experience was the definition of the word bosk, which is used very, very, very frequently. Bosk is a thicket of bushes or a small wood. Now you know. Otherwise, this was just en entire disappointing read, albeit a relatively brief one. Thanks Netgalley.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harvest was originally to be Jim Crace's last novel but following its, at least to the author, unexpected success (Booker shortlisted, winning the Dublin Literary Award), he decided to continue:

I was surprised by its success. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won two international awards. Prize money is not for spending on a cruise or golf club membership. It’s supposed to pay for more books, so the puritan in me said I owed the prizes a novel.

The inspiration for Crace's novels comes from unexpected places - the ideas for Harvest came at the Watford Gap, and he explains in detail on the publisher's website the origin of The Melody:

My novels are hardly autobiographical. They tend to spring from something puzzling or troubling beyond my experience rather than from events in my own life. So it was with The Melody. About three years ago, I was on the tenth floor of a lavish hotel in Chennai, India, a guest of the Lit for Life Festival. Everything was perfect – except for one annoyance: I couldn’t sleep because of the ceaseless, metallic racket from the waste ground below my suite. I looked down from the window on my first restless night to watch the hotel’s garbage bins being toppled over and raided for food scraps by, mostly, feral dogs and a few other animals I couldn’t, in that half light, put a name to. A couple of them looked alarmingly like children. I lay awake, disturbed in every sense, until the waiter brought my breakfast on a tray.
....
That was the seed for the novel and it provided the question the narrative would hope to answer: What occupies the space between the human mammals in their hotel rooms and those amongst the bins? A realist, autobiographical writer, employing the pen as a camera, might have set the novel in 21st century Chennai. I was wary of that.
....
What I needed was a setting out of Asia and one which could not offend the citizens of any actual place. That meant making up an unnamed nation of my own, something I am very fond of doing. Minting a new world, rather than holding a mirror up to a real one, is a liberation I nearly always search for in my novels for the licence and the freedom it allows. Anything can happen in the realms of make-believe.

So The Melody is set in a time long lost (the late 1920s, say), on a coast unnamed (by the Mediterranean, perhaps) and in a town unbuilt, except within the pages of the novel. ... The only part of Chennai that survives is the night-time racket of the bins - but in The Melody these discords are relocated to disturb the wealth and poverty of an invented place that I hope can stand for Nowadays and Anywhere.

This quote brings out three key aspects of Crace's work

1. His professed nature as a 'fabulist', an inventor of facts, in direct contrast to historic novelists. The desire not to make the book too specific to an actual historic time or place is reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro's approach to The Buried Giant but Crace takes the approach further at micro-level as well with his own invented flora, fauna and historic figures.

As I said in my review of Being Dead, Crace's approach is "a wonderful anecdote to the over-researched Wikipedia-regurgitation that bedevils many novels." He himself has said (and NB this was not meant as criticism of Mantel)

A while back Hilary Mantel - the absolute gold standard for historical novelists- issued some very sensible edicts about writing historical novels. Number one was that if you include a fact then you should make sure it is true. I'm not interested in that at all. I don't want facts, I want to make things up and to dig deep into traditional storytelling to produce a tale that illustrates the subject matter I care about.

2. His avowed lack of directly autobiographical elements in his novels. From the Paris Review

It’s fascinating to make connections between the life and the writing. That is interesting. But what’s more interesting is the way in which the life and the writing don’t match, don’t mirror each other. It’s the lack of correspondence that’s really remarkable. It’s what makes me think that narrative’s much more deeply placed within us than just personal biography.

3. The, sometimes unnoticed and usually quite subtle, but actually quite strong, political element to his works.

It is hard not to see another motivation for this particular novel, even given his avowed lack of personal anecdote in the novels, given that its protagonist is an artist (here a singer song-writer) nearing the end of his career and wondering whether it is worth continuing.

He teased a phrase that might reveal a melody, if he worked on it. Would he find the energy to work on it. He hadn’t written anything worthwhile for a year and more, so why continue now
...
He was aware that whenever in the recent past he had announced in concert that the next song was a new one, there was more regret in the room than excited expectation.

And in some respects. Melody has elements of the singer who, to keep the long-standing fans happy, inserts hooks from his old works into his new songs.

Before the novel begins we have one of Crace's signature made-up epigraphs - a trick he had actually renounced some books ago on the grounds it was too successful - accompanied here by invented acknowledgements, including one that delightfully breaks off mid sentence.

And on page 2 it is "welcome back to Craceland" as we read:

He'd drunk a little more than usual, three or four sweet tots of Boulevard Liqueur, a woman's drink.
The Melody

from previous novels (and I suspect I have missed some books) we have other appearances of this signature invented drink:

What is your favourite drink? (Boulevard Liqueur. No rocks.)
All That Follows

Afterwards, fueled by the older children of the house who'd serve them coffee or little cups of Boulevard Liqueur throughout the night, the neighbours and the relatives would reminisce about the dead, starting with the hearsay of the couple's final, bludgeoned breaths.
Being Dead

Buy one bottle of our Boulevard Liqueur and get a second free.
The Devil's Larder

He was in the advert for Boulevard Liqueur.
Six

And just to hammer home the point, The Melody also has the singer Alfred Busi writing a song about the drink Blue Chartreuse; tourists coming to his home-town often order it in bars only to be told it exists solely in Busi's song, or find themselves fobbed off with a fake concoction.

Craceland fans will also be pleased to see quotes from Mondazy's Truisms, the reappearance of Dell'Ova, a front door made "from the hardest tarbony" and Panache saloon cars (and I'm sure others I have missed).

A crucial role in the story is played by:

What the French would call garrigue but we born here know better as the bosk, a tangled, aromatic, salt-resistant maze of sea-thorn, carob and pine-scrub, later described as a dark spreading mass of tarbonies and pepper oaks, tamarisks and pines, casuarinas and carob trees

Here I wasn't clear if Crace was deliberately using the relatively uncommon English term bosk (e.g. used in Walter Scott's The Lord of the Isles), which seems more a small wood than anything similar to garrigue, or whether Crace had played his usual game of inventing a word only to hit on one that actually exists.

So far I've written a lot of words about Crace's approach, and my scorecard on Craceland bingo, but little about the novel itself. Truth to tell, stripping those elements away, there isn't much to say. There are some nice musings on ageing, such as when Busi has romantic stirrings for his sister-in-law, following the death of his wife Alicia:

It wasn’t wanting her that was overwhelming and disturbing Busi, but wondering, just wondering about the possibilities, the distant and receding possibilities, the what might have been rather than the more stirring and heroic what might be now or in the future. In recent years, even before Alicia died, Busi had noticed his cravings slowly changing tense.

But Crace's political agenda here is too heavy-handed and cliched, there are one or two rather silly elements (a part written on a typewritter without the letter 'o', a character called Lexxx), and the book loses its way completely in the second part, where the narrator reveals himself and becomes part of the story.

A disappointing 2 stars as a stand alone work but 4 as part of Crace's impressive canon - so 3 overall.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up. This didn't have quite the same impact on me as his previous novel, Harvest, did. Like several other reviewers I have read here, I was also rooting for it to win the 2013 Booker Prize. This new novel (and I am thankful there is one since Crace announced his retirement in 2013) is not quite the masterpiece that Harvest is, but it is still excellent and the writing is gorgeous. Little here to criticize.

[Ingrid · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a book that I enjoyed. Perhaps not bad, but not for me anyway.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Melody, which Crace says will be his last novel, has two uneven parts, the first taking up three-quarters of the short book. They are also uneven in that, while the first part is near perfect, the second part is merely very well written, but with a narrative voice that becomes a character, and the working out, plotwise, of a first part that is not characterized by plot. Crace’s perfect ear is a joy throughout. His prose is calmly marvelous. I’m fortunate that I still have several of his novels left to read. A 4.5.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I made a mistake listening to this on audio. I'm usually such a fan of Jim Crace's writing, and I have copies of Harvest and Continent waiting to be read. But man was the audio brutal. I just could not get into it, struggled to connect with the characters, and ultimately didn't understand why it took so long to cover so little.

Utterly disappointed because I expected so much more.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

As he walked away, grimly happy with himself, he swung the chain of Persian bells, still hanging from the hinges and the latch, and listened to the melody that no one wrote, the song that had no words, the water that was waiting for its stone.

Having only read Harvest by Jim Crace before (and loving that book, so I should have thought of picking him up again before now), I don't have a wide basis for considering him as an author overall. I can only note that The Melody shares many characteristics with that earlier Man Booker shortlisted, International DUBLIN Literary Award winning read (an allegory out of time, focussed on social justice issues, gorgeous line-by-line writing), and while I was just as thoroughly immersed in the story this time as last, I ended Melody thinking that it wasn't nearly as impactful or successful as Harvest. Still, if my only complaint is that Crace didn't live up to the standards of his own previous work, this book can still be pegged a notch above the ordinary.

Death does not tidy up or sweep as it departs. We all of us leave traces other than the ashes and the bones.

As the book opens, we meet Alfred Mr. Al Busi – a recently widowered man in his sixties, locally famous as a crooner and songwriter, rambling around the large seaside villa he was born in – and we soon learn of his loneliness and grief. There's nothing specific about the timeframe (perhaps the 1920s – Busi dials a candlestick phone, and while there are cars, he travelled by horse and wagon as a child) and nothing specific about the setting (perhaps somewhere on the Mediterranean, but there are no geographic clues in the various characters' names), and this nonspecificity allows the story to be universal and seemingly allegorical; Busi is everyman and his fate is ours. When Busi is attacked in his kitchen late one night (By an animal? A vagrant? A wild child?), events are put in motion that will see not only the poor and homeless driven out of town, but Busi's own family home put under threat in the names of progress and development. Crace's writing kept me intrigued the entire time, as with the details of the midnight attack:

At the moment that it fled the riches of his larder and came for him, Busi could not say exactly what it was. Something fierce and dangerous, for sure, something that must have slipped inside the house in the moment when he was setting right the disorder in the yard. But its species? No idea. And male or female? Well, the smell was hardly womanly. The smell could not belong to any bed or any wife. It was neither sweet nor savory. No, it was pungent, lavatorial at first, and then much flatter. Not a bad smell, actually. Not excrement. Not sweat. More a mix of earth and mold and starch. Potato peel. The creature's skin would feel as smooth, as damp, as lightly pelted as potato peel. Naked too. Naked as potato peel.

And I found several passages bizarrely funny, as with the tabloid journalist who worked himself into a frenzy exaggerating facts and misquoting sources in his writeup of the attack:

Soubriquet settled at his desk and wrote his four-voweled “Unrest” article at speed. For reasons that were awkward to explain and not easy to suppress, he found the process stimulating. Sexually, that is. This was nearly always how his deadlines were achieved. Impulse, effort, and reward.

There are a lot of lovely bits about ageing and loss and loneliness – it seems Busi's only, sort of, friend is his dead wife's sister; an elegant widow who is lamenting her own declining powers of attraction – and just as Busi's sentimental songs have gone out of fashion, progress (in the form of Busi's nephew and presumptive heir) seems to demand that the streets be cleared of homeless vagrants, the forested “bosk” be cleared of wild animals, that Busi's own home be cleared to make way for condos. This storyline about rapaciously subduing the wildness and razing the past might be a little heavy handed, but it's not unrelated to where we find ourselves today environmentally or socially. The complaint I have about The Melody is the narrative structure: For most of the book, there is a third-person narrator who speaks directly to the reader every now and then, explaining that he knows what Busi's every move and thought were because they eventually had many in-depth conversations about the singer's life (yet how he knew about, say, the journalist's private life is never explained). And then late in the book, the story shifts to this narrator's own point-of-view, and other than dividing the story into a sort of lonely before and an after in which Busi has made a couple of new friends, I found the whole structure a bit pointless; why bother? Hard to say, but beyond my small complaints (including the superiority of Harvest by comparison), I was captivated by this read, and most especially by the details in Crace's writing:

We leave him sitting in his drawing room, the midnight widower. He has the wide stool to himself. He sits there looking at the sea and stars until his head drops with exhaustion and his chin is rested on his chest. He's in between the dusk and dawn, between the future and the past. He can either fall asleep and dream, or he can stay awake and dream, all day, all night. That's what we're free to do. We are. We are. We are the animals that dream.

[Paige Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warning: take this review from whence it comes; I am the hugest fan of this author. He could write a shopping list and I'd give it five stars.

Jim Crace is the master of allegorical novels set in no particular time or location. The Melody is the story of Alfred Busi, a famous singer, ageing and coming to terms with the gradual end of his career and widowhood.

One night Busi is attacked by a feral child stealing food from his larder, and it spins the town into controversy and panic.

If you're looking for a tightly plotted, fast-paced novel, this isn't for you, this is literary fiction. But the writing is his superb and lyrical staple. He covers themes of loss and ageing, poverty, development and gentrification, as well as refugees and who belongs where in a xenophobic world.

Am so ecstatic that Crace has a new novel out, but in mourning that now I will probably have to wait years for the next one.

(Cute bit of info: the character, Busi, first appeared in a short story in Crace's collection, The Devil's Larder (2001). Story number 60, about a restaurant that doesn't serve food. In the story, the character's name is Tambar and he only appears in this one sentence (pic attached). Crace says he never felt he got the character's name quite right, at the time he'd liked that he was a musician and his name sounded like tambourine, but later regretted that move. More recently he came up with the name Alfred Busi, and he realised he'd finally found the essence of the character and wanted to carry on writing about him, and that was one of his influences for this novel.)

[Marjorie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alfred Busi is better known in his town as Mister Al, the singer/pianist. But his venues aren’t as large as they once were and he’s in mourning for his much beloved wife. He’s not keeping up his home very well and it’s getting a bit worn down. He’s often awakened in the night by animals raiding the garbage cans in his courtyard. One night upon hearing the noises in the courtyard, he ventures down to set things right. He’s suddenly attacked – scratched and bitten – and he’s sure it wasn’t an animal but had the sense that it was a naked wild boy. The report of the attack sets off a series of rumors of what’s living in the nearby woods and ignites fear and discord throughout the town.

This is a beautifully written tale of love and age and grief and reputation. It’s slow moving but very compelling and unusual and poetic in nature. It’s almost like a fairy tale or a dream that just carried me along in its flow. For all its poetry, it’s also political and makes a strong statement against the prejudices that many of those who are more fortunate have against the homeless and poor. The author is a past winner of the Man Booker Prize and I had read that he had retired from writing but then came out with this book. I’m glad he did and am looking forward to reading more of his work. This one will long remain in my memory due to its distinctiveness.

Recommended.

This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Crace has written several of my favorite books ("Harvest", "Quarantine" and "The Pesthouse") and this certainly ranks up there with them. He uses absolutely spectacular prose and his stories are always very imaginative and creative. This book tells the story of Alfred Busi a retired musician who is still dealing with the passing of his wife after two years when he is suddenly the victim of a very mysterious occurrence. This sets off a series of events that alter his life. Another great Crace book!

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) "We leave him sitting in his drawing room, the midnight widower. He has the wide stool to himself. He sits there looking at the sea and stars until his head drops with exhaustion and his chin is rested on his chest. He's in between the dusk and dawn, between the future and the past. He can either fall asleep and dream, or he can stay awake and dream, all day, all night. That's what we're free to do. We are. We are. We are the animals that dream."

[Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alfred Busi also known as mister Al, as the story unravels be called by other names, as his integrity comes under attack in an article in a newspaper, after he himself becomes physical attacked of the indescribable kind, an animal or a destitute boy?  Used to be a thriving singer and pianist in youth in this tale of a coastal town of no known name but in a time possibly before 1930’s and he’s getting old, a show here and there, but time will tell and as the story unravels, and he is still to set aside his wife that lays in ashes, he is to be up against many challenges and changes and just how he takes them on has you in the tale, the town, the somewhat cleansing of it, and the moving forward progression of one kind and singling out of another.
The main protagonist Busi, of whom has a few battles of the heart, of loss, safety, of losing home, and dignity, wife gone he has his sister in-law on his tail, and his nephew has him caught in a dilemma.
For those that care for some lucid prose to read with some simplicity and great characterisation, a kind of denizens of a town study that just serve up some pleasant easy reading in old storytelling sequence in a kind of Dickens and Balzac strain.

Excerpts and review also @ https://more2read.com/review/melody-jim-crace/

[Donna Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We are the animals that dream.”

Jim Crace is an award-winning author with an established readership, but he is new to me. Thanks go to Net Galley and Doubleday for the review copy. This book will be available to the public Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Those that love literary fiction should take note.

Alfred Busi is a singer, and he was famous during his prime, but now he’s old, living alone in his villa with just his piano to keep him company. At the story’s outset he hears a noise below late at night and goes down to run the animals or the whoever out of his garbage bins, but instead he is attacked. Something or someone flies out and bites him a good one; he thinks it was a boy, a half-feral child:

“Busi could not say what it was, something fierce and dangerous, for sure…before the creature’s teeth sank into right side of his hand, and, flesh on flesh, the grip of something wet and warm began its pressure on his throat, Busi knew enough to be quite sure that this creature was a child. A snarling, vicious one, which wanted only to disable him and then escape.”

The problem—beyond the injury itself—is that Busi is elderly, forgetful, and occasionally confused. His wife is dead, and he’s grieving hard. The only people remaining in his life are his sister-in-law and her son, his nephew, and they aren’t sure he isn’t delusional. Medical staff question his reliability as well; soon, a truly nasty journalist writes a smear piece making fun of him, and it comes out just as he is scheduled to perform for the last time at a concert where he’s to receive a prestigious award. It’s all downhill from there.

Concurrently there’s discussion among the locals about the homeless people living in the Mendicant Gardens—a place entirely devoid of foliage, where makeshift shacks are erected from cardboard, scrap lumber and whatever else is on hand—as well as the fate of the bosc. I find myself searching Google here because I am confused. I have never heard of a bosc, which turns out to be a wooded area of sorts, and my disorientation is compounded by not knowing where in the world this whole thing is unfolding. If our protagonist lives in a villa, and if we’re not in Mexico, then are we in Southern Europe somewhere? I am following language cues; the names of things and places sound like they could be Italian, or maybe French. Or in Spain. The heck? I go to the author bio, but that’s no help, since Crace lives in the U.S. I try to brush this off and live with the ambiguity, but I continue wishing that I could orient myself. It’s distracting. There’s a social justice angle here involving society’s obligation to its poorest members, but I am busy enough trying to establish setting that the effect is diluted.

Nevertheless, the prose here is sumptuous and inviting. Adding to the appeal is the clever second person narrative; we don’t know who is talking to us about Mr. Busi, and we don’t know whether the narrator is speaking to a readership or to someone specific. For long stretches we are caught up in the plight of our protagonist and forget about the narrator, and then he pops back in later to remind us and pique our curiosity.

I am surprised to see this title receive such negative reviews on Goodreads. To be sure, GR reviewers are a tough lot, but there are some angry-sounding readers out there. What they seem to share in common is that they are Crace’s faithful fans, and if this title is a letdown for them, I can only imagine what his best work looks like; after a brief search I added one of his most successful titles to my to-read list, because I want to see what this author could do in his prime.

And there it is. Many people won’t want to read this, because we don’t like thinking about old age and death. Busi’s whole story is about the slow spiral that occurs for most people that live long enough to be truly old. It’s depressing. Those of us that are of retirement age don’t want to think about it because it’s too near; those that are far from it are likely to wrinkle their noses and move on to merrier things. It’s a hard sell, reading about aging, physical decay, and dementia. And there are specific passages that talk about Busi’s injuries and physical maladies that caused me to close the book and read something else when I was eating. It’s not a good mealtime companion.

Crace is known as a word smith, and rightly so. If you seek a page-turner, this is not your book, but for those that admire well-turned phrases and descriptions as art, this book is recommended.

[Ruth Brookes · Rating 2 out of 5]

On a run of books I can’t finish... found this tedious and slow.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crace’s new novel “The Melody” focuses on fictional famous singer Alfred Busi who is entering his twilight years living in the dilapidated villa situated in a seaside town where he was born. His position as one of the town’s most prominent and respected citizens is changing to that of a relic from the past as he’s being honoured by a placement in the town’s Hall of Fame. In conjunction with this honour, he’s been invited to give a performance that’s meant to symbolize the crowning achievement of his career. But he’s unsettled by rumblings from strange animals who plunder the rubbish bins outside his house at night and one evening when he goes down to investigate this disturbance he suffers a brief attack by an unknown naked boy who is plundering his larder. This odd occurrence sets him off on a downward spiral as he becomes aware of an impoverished section of the community that represents a perceived threat to the more civilized citizens of the town. He also discovers there are designs to bring down the crumbling villa he shared with his late wife to make way for a swish new modern development. In this way, Crace dramatizes class conflict and the angst of modern life through the collapse of a grieving musician’s life.

Read my full review of The Melody by Jim Crace on LonesomeReader

[Latkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an allegorical tale set in a coastal town, as ageing musician Albert Busi aka 'Mister Al' suffers a vicious attack in his own home from some kind of creature. He's convinced that it was human child, or at least some kind of human. Next to his ramshackle house, where he lives alone since his wife died, is 'the bosk', a wild wooded area, home to all kinds of creatures. This novel is essentially about the wild within and the wild without, but it's also a fine commentary on the way that towns and communities try to get rid of 'undesirables' - the poor who have no homes and no hopes. I liked the way that we didn't meet the narrator of the novel until near the end, and how the story flowed not unlike one of Mister Al's folk songs.

[J.D. DeHart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Melody displays Jim Crace’s poetic and often dark prose. There is a sense of absurdity, almost Kafkaesque, in Crace’s work. I discovered this author some years ago when I worked as a librarian and I’m always delighted to find a new book from him. This is a text for those wishing to sample fine literature being woven in the present.

[Matthias · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore the prose of Jim Crace. It flows like music, and it is only fitting that he returns (after All That Follows) to another musician. Many of his books have as a theme the loss of control (clearly so in the title above, more so in the Booker nominee Harvest, and also in my favorite Signals of Distress), and this is the case here as well. The protagonist, Mr. Al, is losing control in multiple ways. Physically at the beginning, narratively in the second part when the anonymous narrator takes over. Even the author is losing control in the acknowledgements. All this makes an unsettling and purposefully unsatisfying read. We, like Mr. Al, have been promised to much, and expected too much.

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

A famous singer, now widowed and ageing, has lived in the same seaside villa his whole life and most of his memories of his childhood and married life are associated with it, the beach, the town and particularly the patches of wilderness within the town. One day he is both attacked and honoured, and the events which follow change almost everything about his life and his town.
The setting is well drawn, but also vague, perhaps Mediterranean, probably the 1920s or 1930s, before the whole of the coastline vanished beneath hotels and apartments. This makes it relevant to anywhere facing development or 'gentrification'.
This is a beautifully written book and the character of Alfred Busi, the singer, finely nuanced and detailed. I did not love this book as much as the other two of his I have read, but it is still a very good one and I recommend it to...
The judges of the 2018 Man Booker prize.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Patty Shlonsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The Melody” tells the story of an aging singer, who at a younger stage of his life was beloved and famous and is clinging to the melodies as he ages.

Alfred Busi is living in a no name town, likely somewhere in Europe, in an age old villa on the sea. He had lived in the villa as a child and throughout his marriage to Alicia. When we meet Alfred he is two years a widower and is somewhere in his late 60s. His wife’s ashes are still living with him in the villa.

Alfred’s villa and the villa next door are the last of an era. When we first meet him it is nighttime and he hears noises outside the villa. These types of noises are common as his villa borders a woods where animals and perhaps other supernatural beings live, coming out at night to investigate food possibilities. He walks downstairs in his villa and is attacked by something and bitten in the hand and face. He is certain it is not an animal, but rather a child, perhaps a Neanderthal. His bandaged face is in the local newspaper as he is about to be inaugurated into the Avenue of Fame.

After he is bitten he calls his sister-in-law, Terina, for help. In his younger years he and Terina had a romantic moment, but he had chosen the younger sister, Alicia. Terina’s son (Alfred’s nephew) Joseph, is an opportunistic hothead whose mere existence is an ongoing annoyance to Alfred.

A couple of days after the bite, Alfred goes to a medical clinic for the first of 10 rabi shots (although after the experience it is the last). While walking home he sees picture for a new high end apartment development on the very spot where his villa stands. Joseph is one of the developers.

Alfred is so upset that he walks home through a seedy part of town where he is mugged and beaten. Although he is supposed to perform a concert that evening, he fails to show. And it would appear that he will never perform again. Reflecting on the events of the day, he decides that what he has learned is that “his public life had reached its tipping point. Behind him lay celebrity; before him was obscurity. And insignificance, perhaps.”

The balance of the story involves Alfred’s life in the new apartment complex and his two new young friends, Lex and the unnamed young man who is telling Alfred’s story. They have a picnic, finally distribute Alicia’s ashes and return home. The ending of the book, much like the rest of the book, is strange and disturbing.

The story seems to focus on the sad loneliness of aging. Although there are moments of kindness in the story, each character (with the exception perhaps of Lex) is miserable, sad and generally unlikeable. Life is short and there is so much out there to read. I will have done my job well if I convince you to pass on this one. If you like this review subscribe to www.frombriefstobooks.com for more