Vikram Seth Answers Questions

This question was about the source of his novel AN EQUAL MUSIC, and his knowledge of Western classical music.

'I love music. Of course that’s no qualification for being able to write a novel about it. In fact music, like any other art, seems to be a particularly poor subject for a novel. Because how do you explain one art in terms of another? The second disqualification is that my own training – my original training – was in Indian classical music. North Indian classical music I should say (because we have Karnatik music as well as Hindustani music so to speak). I played the flute for a while – but basically it was gazal singing and a bit of tabla just to get the thal right.

I came to Western music somewhat late. I’d heard a little bit of it when I was young but basically it was when I was in university in England; and largely through a friend who loved Bach. And actually that was a wonderful ingress into Western music because there are aspects of Bach which are very appreciable by people trained in the Indian tradition. So that’s how I got into it; and twenty years or twenty five years later I wrote this novel about Western music, called AN EQUAL MUSIC.

The first question is why or how did the novel come about? That happened because I was walking across Hyde Park on a rainy day with a friend of mine: a musician, in fact the dedicatee of the book.

And I said “Phillipe, I have this sudden feeling that this chap who is staring at the Serpentine is related to my next book. But tell me something about him – I don’t know his nationality, his profession…”

Phillipe says “well, where is this person?”

I said “no, I mean in my mind’s eye”

He says “all I can say is, he’s a musician.”

I said “well that’s special pleading – you’re a musician. But can you go on from there?”

“Well, he’s a violinist”

“Phillipe, I know you’re a violinist, but the violin isn’t my favourite instrument. Can’t he be a cellist?”

“No, he’d have to lug it around.”

And that’s how it began.

But the problem about writing about music was…I had to somehow make the musical bits of it not seem like concert notes...I basically thought that the only way of getting around it would be to write it in the first person: in the voice of a real musician, in whose mouth all this stuff would not seem like jargon but like his own obsessions. But of course the problem with the first person is the first person is an unreliable person – not only vis a vis his own memories, but also his judgement of other people. Whereas someone who writes, say, A SUITABLE BOY is sort of semi-omniscient and can tell you what these people are and who they are and so on, the first person narrator is someone who is intrinsically suspect. So that came in as an unexpected side effect of trying to get around the musical problem.'