An Ungrateful Instrument
by Michael Meehan
Published by Transit Lounge
ISBN 97806455653
$32.99
For his fifth novel, Michael Meehan turns to 17th-century France and the court of Louis XIV, a far cry from the dusty barren reaches of the mallee country of his acclaimed debut, . Imagining the lives and relationships of the musical Forqueray family, who were to secure their place in world history through virtuosity with the seven strings of the viola da gamba, he explores worlds of painstaking craft, high art and vaulting ambition. Tyranny runs like blood throughout the book: the tyranny of music over the musician and of the father over his son. Notednarrative. The ‘ungrateful instrument’ was both imprisoned and then exiled by his father, made possible by his position at court and the creeping army of lawyers he retains. That Jean-Baptiste was trained by rhythmic beatings, ‘forging links between beauty and the memory of pain’, appears entirely plausible against such a backdrop. So too the father’s abusive relationships with the women in his family, the self imposed silence of his eldest daughter, the narrator, both a response to his violence and refuge for those others subject to it. In describing ‘a life that was his, but not quite his’, Meehan is looking to the son. It could equally be the father however, whose eye is always to posterity, to his legacy, agonised by a future generation no ‘power of covenants and beatings and any form of repetition’ can control.
