Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah by Charles King
“I was one continued shudder from the beginning to the end of the performance.” So said Abigail Adams in 1784 about the first mass-scale performance of Handel’s Messiah, written in 1741. Singers, players and audiences have continued to shudder ever since as the oratorio has become probably the most performed piece in the repertoire. The power of the Messiah, as Charles King says in his fascinating history of the work, is something of an oddity, given that the text – by Charles Jennens – is a compilation of biblical snippets that laud the redeeming Christ. Nevertheless, Handel’s great achievement was, in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s estimation, to turn singers and musicians into “conductors of his electricity” and audiences into its recipients.
King’s narrative is wide-ranging, taking in not just the ailing composer and his circle –such as Thomas Coram, instigator of London’s Foundling Hospital –
but the uncomfortable realities of 18th-century musical performance, how the Messiah coincided with the birth of the Enlightenment, and why the Jacobite rising of 1745 gave the work a nationalistic fervour. In King’s telling, the “Hallelujah Chorus” is just one rousing highlight among many.
By Michael Prodger
Bodley Head, 352pp, £25
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht
Reading Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash is like holding up a mirror to another mirror and admiring the infinite reflections: there’s the original image and then the endless display of likenesses. At the centre of the novel is a man named Christian Kracht – just like the author – who also happens to have written Fraserland, the debut that was penned by the non-fictional Kracht in 1995.
Fictional Kracht and his unstable 80-year-old mother embark on a journey across Switzerland in a hired cab. Amid their humorous exchanges and the inconceivable occurrences, the two protagonists are haunted by their past – a dead father figure, Nazism, substance abuse and trauma – that seamlessly blends into the narrative. In this book that lies between a novel and a fictionalised history, the author presents an uncanny level of self-awareness through his on-the-page self. Through Kracht’s crafty writing, it’s difficult to discern whether you’re reading about the author or his fictional likeness. Though the made-up Kracht and his mother could not be described as good people, you can’t help but sympathise with them in the end.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Serpent’s Tail, 192pp, £12.99
Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith
Joan Smith owes the title of her new book to an Italian tour guide she overheard. Lecturing on the salacious history of Rome’s first imperial family, he confidently opined that the Emperor Augustus did not have any sons, and “unfortunately his daughter was nymphomaniac”. Was she really? Why are we so sure? Because – the guide and scholars argued – the ancient sources tell us so. But the ancient sources tell us all kinds of things which historians now regard with justifiable scepticism. Yet when the imperial wives and daughters are cast as poisoners, adulteresses and whores, we accept the narrative.
No longer. Smith has combined two of her fiercest passions, Classics and feminism, to rehabilitate them. She picks out the misogyny woven into the ancient texts and draws uncomfortable comparisons to contemporary attitudes and sex-based violence. Maybe, she argues, our continued eagerness to take tales of sex-crazed empresses at face value and ignore the horrors – child-marriage, rape, exile, murder – endured by Rome’s most powerful women says more about us than about them.
By Rachel Cunliffe
William Collins, 304pp, £22
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe
Christopher Swann has been following the Processus Group, a pernicious right-wing think tank, since his student days at Cambridge and exposing their sinister intentions via his blog. Until one day, at a right-wing conference, he is murdered. It’s then up to his adopted daughter Rash and close friend Phyl to solve the case.
This novel takes in three genres: cosy crime, dark academia and auto-fiction. Jonathan Coe’s exploration of the hybrid form is admirable, but not always cogent. A critique of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership falls flat when the fabulously camp murder-mystery plot involves a homoerotic (“satirical”) naked brawl to the death. It’s hard to know what’s ironic and what’s blistering anger.
The Proof of My Innocence is supremely readable and at times genuinely funny. Pulling at the threads of each genre comes at the price of unravelling the novel’s coherence. But if Coe is exploring what truth is, why it matters, and how it can or should be represented in literature, then perhaps the total chaos presented is the most faithful depiction possible.
By Zoë Huxford
Viking, 352pp, £20
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone