“The Melody“ by Jim Crace - review

 “The Melody” by Jim Crace:

This is Jim Crace’s latest novel after his Booker Prize finalist Harvest. It is a a meditation on grief and poverty, an ecological fable, a lyrical and tender rumination on marital love and loss. 

The aging concert singer Alfred Busi, much cherished in his hometown for his music and songs, in the early hours hears foragers rattling the bins in the backyard of his seaside villa which has been his and his wife’s home for decades and, while investigating, is attacked, scratched and bitten by a mysterious nocturnal scavenger, he thinks it was a feral boy, neither man nor animal. Busi recently lost his beloved wife Alicia, and now feels the weight, the maladies and ailments of old age setting in and his lifelong career as a celebrated singer seems to draw to a close. He is a man taking stock of his life and looking into an uncertain future. 

His only living close relatives are the sister of his wife, Terina whom he, despite her haughty, cool aloofness, still desires and her son Joseph, a repugnant timber tycoon and housing developer. A few days after the attack, Busi discovers that his nephew has arranged for the villa to be demolished and replaced with modern apartments for enormous profit. These machinations set into motion a troubling transformation of the town. 

We don’t really get a precise sense of where and when all this is happening, this seems to be intentional. Events unfold in a coastal town that feels vaguely Mediterranean. The town itself is surrounded by an impenetrable tangle of trees, scrubs, shrubs and underwood, called the Bosk, inhabited by an assortment of wild animals. 

One of the novel’s themes is the conflict between profit and justice. Busi’s attachment to his home is set against the poverty of the town’s homeless population, whom the wealthy class call “neanderthals” and in the name of order, civilization, and decency, not to forget the monetary gain, wish to drive from their dwellings.  Busi‘s fate is personal as well as political.

In the end the house developers succeed, razing the Bosk, driving out all the animals and erecting the seaside apartments as planned, thus changing the atmosphere and spirit of the town considerably. 

Busi, as we are told by the narrator, some six years after the events, gave up his villa and moved into one of the newly erected apartments. 

In a final scene he visits the forests once more with two newfound younger friends, one being the narrator, and his now infirm sister-in-law Terina, to scatter his wife‘s ashes and say a last good-bye. Then they go back to their homes in a changed town, devoid of wildlife. As they contemplate the wilderness a last time the narrator muses: 

“I have the sense… that something other than ourselves persists.  Something wilder and more animated but still resembling us.  Something that must scavenge on its naked haunches for roots and berries, nuts and leaves, roaches, maggots, frogs and carrion, stolen eggs and honey.”

He might have Alfred’s wild boy in mind, but might also reach out to our planet that man wants to bring under control, destructively if necessary.

Sometimes it is better to not look for explanations, sometimes it is even embarrassing to want to convert all what one has read into meaning. Sometimes it might just be enough to appreciate the mood a book induced. In this case I appreciated the sense and mood very much, it stayed with me for quite a while.

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