Music, in a Foreign Language

By Andrew Crumey

Britain with the same post-war history as East Europe battling against a totalitarian regime. "The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality." The Sunday Times Music, in a Foreign Language won The Saltire Best First Book Award and launched the literary career of one of the UK's cleverest and most original post-modern novelists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dedalus
• Release date: Nov 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781909232389

Andrew Crumey

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After six years as the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he now combines teaching creative writing at Northumbria University with his writing.He is the author of seven novels: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D'Alembert's Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000, Dedalus edition 2014), Mobius Dick (2004, Dedalus edition 2014) Sputnik Caledonia(2008, Dedalus edition 2015)) and The Secret Knowledge (2013).Andrew Crumey's novels have been translated into 14 languages.

Reviews for Music, in a Foreign Language

[jonfaith · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An ordered first novel, this is a 3.5 star effort. It is also mild and polite. The novel concerns political oppression and betrayal in an alternate historical 20C where the UK is subject to a Stalinist regime. The previous two sentences create a tension. Victory gin can help with that. Two of the characters play duets --which makes for brighter mornings. There's a car crash and a great deal of sitting on trains.

There's a good deal of meta reframing going along: found notebooks, the germ of a novel during a nocturnal trip to the toilet. There's also philosophical musing -- destiny and love fare and fall. There a crackpot who claims that physics led him to Jesus and a cure for halitosis. The novel is drab and understated. There is a stirring within, a promise of a wider violent lens. I think I'd prefer that one.

[jackdeighton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not being a straightforward narrative this is a difficult novel to describe. Tenses shift within sections, there are stories within stories, false starts, rewritten chapters, repetitions of scenarios and the narrator is at pains to point out the fictionality of it all, indeed at times it reads more as a disquisition on literary efforts than an attempt at one. Yet, for all these strictures, it was immensely readable. The tricksiness begins early as the novel starts with Chapter 0, where the narrator is thinking post coital thoughts about two characters who meet on a train and about whom he intends to write a novel. The bulk of Music, in a Foreign Language deals with the back story of one of these, a young man called Duncan, and the events leading up to the death of his father, Robert Waters. Waters and his friend Charles King had at the time been involved in slightly subversive activity in a Soviet style post-war Britain. This was the first appearance of that altered history in which Crumey also set parts of Mobius Dick and Sputnik Caledonia. The compromises such a society demands, the paranoia it engenders - and the betrayals it necessitates - are allowed to emerge organically from the story. Despite the title, music as a motif appears sparingly.My one minor caveat is that the female characters are not as fully rounded as they might be, but the book’s main focus is on the friendship between Waters and King, so perhaps that is understandable.I was equally as impressed by this, Crumey’s debut novel, as I was by both others of his I have read. If you like well written, thoughtful - even playful - novels you could do worse than give Crumey a try.