Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > August Blue

I'd eaten nothing all day except the croissants Marie had brought to my apartment. But that wasn't strictly true. The stars and the Seine were inside me. I was living in a very strange way, but I knew there were people in the world who were also living like this. Someone in Tokyo or Eritrea or New York or Denmark at this very moment was living life precariously, too. This mood, with its ambience of low level panic and hyper-alert connections to everything, would have its double or echo. I heard its music in my head under my hat. Her hat. It was hard to listen to it, but it was there, like a future that was obscure, a future infected by the governance of the world, the old and new tyrants and their consorts and enablers. I no longer wanted to think about them because they had too much attention anyway. Yet, I thought about them all the time.

And what about my double, who perhaps was not physically identical? To think about her was to speak to someone known, inside myself, someone who was slightly mysterious to me, someone who was listening very attentively.

The latest novel from an author whose previous three 21st Century novels (“Swimming Home”, “Hot Milk” and “The Man Who Saw Everything”) have been Booker longlisted (the first two Booker shortlisted and the last two Goldsmith Prize shortlisted) and who has also published a deservedly critically acclaimed Living Autobiography trilogy (“Things I Don’t Want to Know”, “The Cost of Living” and the particularly brilliant “Real Estate”).

There is a certain enigmatic quality to Levy’s fiction (although her contemporaneous non fiction writing does help to bring a certain clarity to it).

About “Hot Milk” I wrote “the narrative serves more as a device to set up a series of tableaux filled with striking imagery …. [which is] internally consistent and coherent building up a picture of female identity”.

For the brilliant “The Man Who Saw Everything” I found it easily the most enigmatic book on the Booker longlist (as well as one of the best), referred to a “final disintegration of any attempt at a conventional narrative … [justifiably] sacrificed on the alters of ideas and analogy” and was fascinated by the multiple possible interpretations (I read and discussed it twice with my two closest Goodreads friends and we all majored on different elements of the book in our reviews and readings).

This novel I think, at least on a first reading, was perhaps closer to “Hot Milk” although with it not due to being published until May, I am intrigued to see what other interpretations and lenses other readers bring to bear on the book - as well as on some of its anomalies which unlike “The Man Who Saw Everything” I was unable to easily relate to the book’s central idea.

I did wonder if my lack of knowledge of and (being honest) interest in classical music hindered my appreciation and understanding of the novel.

The novel is narrated in first person by Elsa M. Anderson. Fostered at a very young age in Suffolk (birth name Ann), she was at 6 taken under the wing of a brilliant and eccentric music teacher Arthur Goldstein (who knows her birth mother’s identity – but which Elsa has always chosen not to discover) and moved with him to his music school in London and then on via the Royal Academy of Music to become a world class/famous classical pianist.

Three weeks before the September in which the book starts, Elsa, now 34, how had already in some kind of mid-career crisis dyed her famously long brown hair blue (hence the book’s title), froze (pun not intended but acknowledged) during a concert in Vienna playing the wrong music and then walked off the stage and seemingly away from her concert career.

She is now travelling around cities (starting in Athens), meeting with some friends and taking on some private music tuition.

The book opens in a flea market – where she watches (and is watched and recognised) by a woman of similar age and appearance the woman buys the last two of some mechanical dancing horses Elsa is interested in but leaves behind a trilby which Elsa then adopts. As Elsa travels around she becomes convinced that the woman is some form of double and that she spots her as she moves around (London in October and December, Paris in November and then August, Sardinia in July) in a COVID world (with masks playing a prominent role – presumably symbolic of hidden identities).

And Elsa meditates and reflects on classical music and dance and much more besides – all of this against a background of Elsa coming to terms with her sudden career hiatus, what was behind her abandonment by her birth mother – the twin horses triggering early memories which draw her closer to her origins) and her relationship to the now Sardinia-based, ill and ageing Arthur (who to her surprise has a lover) – all of which causes her to reflect on her seemingly unravelling identity in the world – and all of this refracted through the absence/presence and even voice in her head of her double.

3.5 stars rounded up as I believe new depths to the novel will emerge around publication.

My thanks to Penguin General and Viking for an ARC via NetGalley

It occurred to me that what I had transmitted to her, across four countries, was pain.

We were all striding out into the world once again to infect and be infected by each other. If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was fool-ish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching.

We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry- and cherry-scented balm, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.