Synopses & Reviews
An eerie ability is passed from grandmother to grandson — who now must
reckon with a new cacophony of voices and sounds, all from the past,
overlaying his life in the present — in this stirring new novel from one
of the UK's most exciting young writers.
Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a
snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes's Hospice
for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its
young wards a grounding in the gift — an inherited ability to tune into
the voices and sounds of the past.
When she dies, Selda's gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who
must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly
unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating,
The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty — or impossibility — of living with the past.
"If Hilary Mantel's
Beyond Black were written by John Banville channelling M. John
Harrison, the result would look something like this. And yet Langley has
made something new and unexpected about how the present is, necessarily
and always, an echo corridor of the past. Beautifully written, powered
by a wonderfully intelligent conceptual dynamo, and deftly sprung with
surprises,
The Variations is an utterly original book about haunting. It is strange, resonant, and, yes, haunting." –Neel Mukherjee, author of
The Lives of Others
Review
"A skillfully told story about inheritance and inspiration, music and
time. Langley has a fine eye for detail and scene-making, and
The Variations is full of startling observations and images." Martin MacInnes, author of
In Ascension
Review
"I thought
The Variations was remarkable. I loved its hallucinatory vision
of music as both gift and affliction, as a sort of crystallised form of
human history. A book of strange and revelatory genius." Anna Smaill,
author of
The Chimes
Review
"The Variations is a passionate meditation on how past and
present meet and annihilate one another in the flare of individual human
experience. Music is presented as a kind of weather, blustery and
changeable, unlimited by its own time. It takes you up, puts you down,
whirls you away. Langley's prose, lyrical and accurate, enlivens and
illuminates. A tremendous, seriously ambitious novel." M. John
Harrison, author of
Wish I Was Here
Review
"The Variations is a wonderfully mysterious novel suffused with a
Lynchian eeriness. I was totally under Langley's spell and under the
thrall of the eerie rhythms governing The Variations. Simply
unforgettable." Brandon Taylor, author
Real Life
Review
"Ecstasy is a word I'd happily associate with Patrick Langley's lyrical and looping novel
The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian
intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning....it
takes place in a world that looks very much like our own but feels alien
and strange, as if brushed by the supernatural. In
The Variations, reality is ever so slightly askew." Matthew Janney,
The Guardian
Review
"The wonderful latest from Langley (Arkady) tells the story of a British avant-garde composer,
semi-estranged from her family and friends, who dies while walking in a
snowstorm in Cornwall...the story of four generations of 'gifted'
individuals unfolds, taking readers from WWII to the present, from
Selda's birth to her death. Langley is a mesmerizing guide to Selda's
music and the fantastical world of the hospice, a 'variously demonized,
patronized, scorned, venerated, vilified, and today largely ignored and
near-bankrupted institution.' This is exquisite." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Patrick Langley is a novelist and art critic. His first novel,
Arkady, was longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and the Deborah Rogers Writers Prize. He is an editor at
e-flux and writes about art for
frieze,
Art Agenda, and other publications.
The Variations is his second novel. He lives in London.