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Bath Fugues by Brian Castro

Reviewed by Sandra Hogan
 

Brian Castro's 'Bath Fugues'The Bath Fugues is a clever, elegant, ambitious play on the double meanings of the word fugue. The structure of the book is that of the musical fugue in which a short melodic theme, or subject, is introduced and then taken up by other voices and interwoven. And all the characters who represent these voices are in a state of fugue in the psychiatric sense: they are in flight from their own identities, wandering far from home.

The most famous and beloved form of the musical fugue is a series of 30 variations for the harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Goldberg Variations. The story of these variations appears in different parts of the novel, forming a theme in itself.  You can find the Goldberg Variations on Utube in a recording by Glenn Gould, hunched over the harpsichord, drawing out the clear, mathematical beauty of Bach’s 1741 composition. I found I enjoyed listening to it while I read the book – it created the mood of calm, poignant melancholy that suited the novel.

And, at times, I read it in the bath, to amuse myself with the punning title and to keep the characters company. Many of them spend a lot of time in the bath, entertaining guests, lustfully or otherwise, or preparing to die. They also bathe in mountain springs in New South Wales, in Daintree waterfalls or, dangerously, in the sea where invisible jellyfish poison them.

The recurring, interwoven theme of all the characters is death and various ways we flee from it.

Jason Redvers is an ageing art forger whose form of flight is to ride his 1928 Swift Safety Bicycle rapidly across rough countryside. Bach and bicycles both have principles and laws, he points out. He paints over other people’s paintings to ‘reveal’  their meaning, reads Montaigne to find out about friendship and gives away the story of his grandfather, the ugly Portuguese poet Conceicao, to his treacherous friend Walter Gottlieb.  Jason is secretive and his language is obscure. He is the central character in the first book of the three, intertwined novellas that make up the book. Titled Beckett’s Bicycle, this book in Jason’s voice has the same long, circling convoluted sentences as a Samuel Beckett character, though without the earthy wit.

Jason’s grandfather Conceicao is the central character in the second novella, Walter’s Brief, the book written by the thieving Walter Gottlieb and published after his death (in a bathroom). Conceicao is a Portuguese lawyer who becomes a judge in Macau until he takes one of his litigants as a concubine and then falls in love with her daughter. At that point he leaves the law and becomes a teacher. He collects valuable Chinese art, paints over it and keeps it in his bathroom. In his bath, he is seduced by a lesbian artist passing through China on her way to Spain and cubism. This seductress, Julia Grace, is the grandmother of Jason. This middle book, set among the exotic and dingy beauties of the east, is the richest  and most poignant of the three.

The third character is a North Queensland doctor, Judith Sarraute, who has a cupboard full of highly toxic venoms passed down to her by her father. Her chapter, Sarraute’s Surgery, brings together all the characters and themes, explaining the mysteries and summing up.

Reading The Bath Fugues is a demanding experience. There is no easy plot to follow, although there are interwoven stories. The characters are peculiar and unlovely and distant. There is no solace in this book, with its focus on melancholy and decay. It is complicated.

And yet it is fascinating. Many of the sentences are impossibly beautiful and evocative:

The slow drip of a Sunday complaint on the fourteenth day of January 1894 fell drop by drop with faint determination from the roof to my numbered door. Rosaries of rain running into braids of guttered music; downpipes of depression, smells of fungus.

In this book, language is music in all its variations. The voices of the characters call out plaintively, cunningly, hopelessly their songs of flight.

The imagery of Australian and Chinese countryside and cities is varied and rich and described with originality. It would be pleasant to lie in a shady pool of water and hear it read out loud. Kaleidoscopes are mentioned in the book and reading it sometimes has that feel of dazzling, ever-changing beauty. If you read quickly you get a dizzy, slightly nauseous feeling the way you would if you turned the tube of the kaleidoscope too fast.  It’s meant for slow, meticulous reading to a ¾ beat.

I love it. I hate it. I don’t know what to think about it. It’s infuriating, difficult, sometimes tedious and yet it gets under my skin. I’m glad I read it. I recommend it with caution.

About the Author

Sandra HoganSandra Hogan has worked as a shop assistant, supermarket shelf stacker, public servant and journalist and she now supports her writing habit by teaching  business people to write reports and letters. She is fascinated, among other things, by the science/religion wars. She is working on a book of linked short stories about lost things.

 

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