Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li review – a virtuosic interrogation of the power of art

In his recently published A History of the Novel in Britain, Philip Hensher makes a bold claim. Historical novels, he tells us, don’t last. However popular and prestigious a historical novel might be in its day, it will almost always get thrown overboard as the ship of literary culture sails on, piled high with novels of contemporary life. He might be on to something. Who now prefers Walter Scott to Jane Austen? The historical novel risks a double obsolescence, courting a future in which it has become an old-fashioned vision of an old-fashioned time.

However much this news might dismay writers of historical novels, Hensher is untroubled: “As readers enjoying our contemporaries, we should not let our readerly pleasures be affected by the probability of ultimate oblivion.” Will the future, what there is of it, rate Wolf Hall as highly as we do? It doesn’t matter. Posterity, as Gore Vidal once wrote, is “a permanent darkness where no whistle sounds”. What matters is us, now, what we make of history and of our lives – in our novels and elsewhere.

Posterity and its ironies form a central theme of Yiyun Li’s new historical novel. In several senses Music Against the Night isn’t, in fact, “a historical novel” – certainly not in the supermarket-own-brand sense of a cosplay adventure in which affable protagonists find themselves chatting with Byron or whoever. Readers of Li will already know that she soars far above the well-meant strivings of lesser writers, occupying a luminous realm of her own. She has the craft that makes craft invisible, and the art that makes art itself her obsessive subject. In Music Against the Night the art is music, as perceived through the lives, and the real and hoped-for afterlives, of two musicians.

Real musicians, as it happens: a married couple, bound by a “contrapuntal fate”. The pianist and composer John Field, born in Dublin in 1782, is now remembered as the inventor of the nocturne, the form perfected by Chopin. There is a room in the National Concert Hall in Dublin called The Field Room. But to listen to Field’s nocturnes when you know Chopin’s is to ponder the gulf between talent and genius. In Li’s telling, Field himself compulsively ponders this gulf, as he becomes “a footnote in the life of Frédéric Chopin”. Li knows that footnote status is the fate of most artists. What does it cost, to live your life in the hope of immortality?

In 1807 Field, by then living in Moscow, took on a student named Adelaide Percheron, an orphan raised by her grandmother in Pondicherry, French India. Adelaide too was a gifted musician, but her ambition was thwarted by the patriarchal strictures of the society into which she was born. John and Adelaide (she was known as “Percherette”), separately wrestling with the enemies of promise, married in 1810. It was not an auspicious union.

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The ordinary historical novelist starts there, and labours through the tempestuous marriage: Field’s drinking, his affairs, Percherette’s despair. But Li’s subject isn’t marriage. Music Against the Night is about the relationship between life and art; about what it means to sacrifice a life to art; and about what exactly is sacrificed, when such a sacrifice is made. Field and Percherette’s marriage is given to us in brief Muriel Spark-like flash-forwards. Long sections, split between Dublin and Pondicherry, follow Field and Percherette closely through late childhood and early adolescence; this is the bulk of the book. Childhood, for both, is short. Both are prodigies: Field on the pianoforte, Percherette as a kind of psychologist, perceiving the hidden truths of human behaviour. What they share is a “willingness to be rescued from an ordinary childhood”.

Li’s narration is unapologetically omniscient, but she has no use for pastiche: she acknowledges she is writing in the 2020s, and yet there’s no historical-novel clutter about horses or furniture. Only that which impinges on her characters, or her theme, is noted. Her narrator is insistently aphoristic: “To be known is the desire that drives much of the world’s progress, also much of its destruction. History is a discourse against obscurity.” Not all the aphorisms work: “an absent anchor only further disturbs an unmoored heart”. But many of them are superb: “Talent, vision, luck, work – all are necessary for a career, but not sufficient. An artist falls short if he cannot master the art of indifference.”

Engaged in their separate discourses against obscurity, John and Percherette fail to master the art of indifference. Their passionate self-scourgings form a counterpoint to the eerily calm and patient gathering-in effects of Li’s prose. The result is pure readerly pleasure – posterity (and this might be what Li, in this novel of half-forgotten artists, is suggesting) be damned.

Late in the novel there is a brief reflection on the loss of a child. Li herself, of course, has written about the loss of her two sons, Vincent and James, to suicide. The subject is not dwelt on at length in Music Against the Night. It forms merely part of a piercing argument about the passions of life versus the austere and indifferent values of art. The aphoristic narrator remarks: “Death is a subject that rewards minor artists.” But “Life? It requires major talent to convey that.” Li conveys life without apparent effort. Major is the word.