Orfeo by Richard Powers

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Reviewed by Susan Osborne

This is the first year that the Man Booker Prize has been opened up to include entries from the U.S.A. Out of a longlist of thirteen, four spots were bagged by American writers, one of whom is Richard Powers, a US National Book Award winner and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Orfeo is the third novel I’ve read by him – The Echo Maker and Generosity were the first two. Both deal with complex issues in erudite, meticulously crafted prose: The Echo Maker looks at identity and neurology through the plight of Mark Schluter who suffers from Capgras syndrome – an inability to recognise the people he knows as anything but their imposters – while Generosity explores the link between personality and genes through a young woman fleeing terror whose happiness seems inexplicable. These brief synopses barely scratch the surface of either novel, stuffed full as they are with observations on the myriad complexities of modern life all neatly wrapped up in engrossing stories. I was expecting a challenge, then, rather than a breezy little read.

Peter Els has spent much of his life composing avant-garde music. He’s tapped out rhythms with his fingers for as long as he can remember. He’s also had a lifelong interest in science, beginning a chemistry degree but changing to music thanks to the charismatic Clara who can see no other path through life. Now seventy, he’s embarking on an attempt to bring these two strands together: setting up a lab in his home, ordering samples of DNA through the internet and experimenting with ways in which the notation for a musical piece might be transcribed into those samples. When his beloved dog suffers a stroke, Els panics, phones 911 and the police turn up, their security antennae soon alerted by the presence of bacteria-filled petri dishes in a suburban home. Next a duo from the Joint Security Task Force lands on his doorstep quizzing him about what he’s up to. Then, while he’s out for a run, his house is raided and he’s faced with a decision: give himself up or make himself scarce. He chooses the latter, giving his weekly lecture at a retirement community before starting out on a road trip which will take him to his ex-wife, his old friend and colleague, and his daughter all of whom try to help him.

Els’s journey is played out against the vivid backdrop of his life story: his childhood marked by the sudden loss of his father, his passionate love affair with Clara, marriage to Maddy and – always – his passion for his work, much of it in collaboration with the manic Richard. Both the journey and his story are punctuated by brief and apparently random thoughts on music, science and life which was, at first, somewhat perplexing but all became clear as the novel drew to an end, making me look back over them again. It’s a novel bursting with ideas. In its complexity, intellect and sheer chutzpah, Orfeo put me in mind of Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, another American novel on the Man Booker longlist, in particular the way Powers writes about music. If I wasn’t such a musical illiterate I’m sure I would have been able to hear Messiaen’s The Quartet for the End of Time in my head from Powers’s description but instead I was captivated by his telling of the story behind it. It’s not a novel that lets you slip your brain into neutral but if you’re prepared to work at it expect to be rewarded even if, like me, you’re left scratching your head over some aspects of it.

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Susan Osborne blogs at A Life in Books. Never, ever leave home without a book.

Richard Powers, Orfeo, (Atlantic Books: London, 2014) 9781782391647 384 pages Paperback.

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