Death of the Black Haired Girl
By Robert Stone
Review: Tom Mooney
Robert Stone is a writer’s writer, a journalist’s journalist, a connoisseur’s connoisseur: his fiction is unfettered in its confidence and precision, his vocabulary immense, his breadth of knowledge unfathomable, and, if you didn’t know better, you might think that Death of the Black Haired Girl was written by a new adherent to the genre of crime writing.
Each sentence has a dexterous freshness, with a younger writer’s natural instinct to embellish each observation, so that ‘the mild sweet wind carried dogwood and azalea blossoms, mission fulfilled, message delivered.’
Much in evidence, almost omniscient, is Stone’s aquifer of knowledge: the insights and the extrapolations which often betray a grinding weariness, an exhaustion of the soul. There is a brilliantly wrought scene in a diocesan office as a priest casually obstructs a grieving father’s attempt to reinter the remains of his daughter with her mother.
“How about opening up and receiving the kid’s ashes?”
“Yeah, well,” Father Washington said in a strange tone, different from the brisk one he had been employing. “Now you want us.”
“Yeah,” Stack said. “Now I want yez.”
“Not so easy,” said the priest, with the hint of a smile.
Any journalist who has dealt with the Catholic Church of old will appreciate the ring of authenticity: Stone, author of Dog Soldiers and a septuagenarian writing better than ever, spent time in a Catholic orphanage, which couldn’t have been a walk in the park.
An orphanage run by the Church makes an appearance in an early short story, Absence of Mercy, and is described by Stone as having “the social dynamic of a coral reef.” In his life, Stone has been around the block a few times: he was in the US Navy for four years, observed the bombing of Port Said by the French, worked for the New York Daily News, hung out with Beat writers and has been publishing novels since 1967.
Death of the Black Haired Girl is less crime novel than thriller, though Stone doesn’t deliberately deal in suspense: sure, there’s a killing and there’s a killer on the loose, but that’s a side show to Stone’s Greek drama. A single event can corral people with apparently little in common. But spilt blood is a rose of union.
Stone is a master of both ambience and atmosphere: the affair between Professor Steven Brookman and his student Maud Stack has as its back drop a college in New England, shrouded by the hues of winter or a river fog. As the affair tumbles messily towards its denouement, reason becomes a slave of the emotions, and shit happens. Stone’s characters are never less than a stone’s throw from a vortex, to which they drift helplessly. Stone once remarked: ‘Somebody has said that it’s almost as hard to stop being a Catholic as it is to stop being a black.’ Death of the Black Haired Girl is also a novel about faith, which is why Stone is compared with Graham Greene. Fiction is a quest to uncover meaning in the darkest of places.
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Thomas Ades
1-3 Violin Concerto Concentric Paths
Augustin Hadelich
Hannu Lintu
(Avie)
Review: Tom Mooney
What makes this recording by Augustin Hadelich stimulating, with Hannu Lintu conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Britain’s oldest, is the opportunity to hear a fresh interpretation by a daring violinist of a challenging composition by Thomas Ades.
Hadelich went out of his way to consult with the English composer prior to the recording, which substantiates the violinist’s reputation as a musician intrigued by the essence of music, by the forces behind the progenation.
There is less opportunity for Hadelich’s fast-gingered brilliance, to paraphrase The New Yorker, to be put to the test with Concentric Paths, although his virtuosity is given ample outing in the accompanying Violin Concerto Op. 47 by Sibelius.
Putting Sibelius and Ades on the same ticket is a smart and practical move: two composers from the opposite side of the musical fence – Ades is very much alive – with the polyrhythms of the former and the different tempi of the latter, and seamlessly served by the virtuosity of a violinist who, with Concentric Paths, overcomes Ades’ hurdles with such ease that it is tempting to forget the scrupulosity of his approach.
In Concentric Paths, Ades has the violin and orchestra play in different meters, but this challenge is one of many. Ades is a composer who can think like a theatre director, and interpreters of Concentric Paths ought not to lose sight of a Pantheistic feel to his music.
The composer stressed the importance of almost excavating the circularity of each movement to Hadelich, with each note pushing against the next, the tension maintained from the pulsating first movement, the brewing second and the intense third and last.
The first movement flows into view, Hadelich’s violin almost going against the flow, like a leaf struggling to stay afloat on a spinning vortex, but Ades’ strings are Spring-like, gushing: the second movement is a passacaglia, a gorgeous bridge between what has gone and what is to come, with the emphasis on an almost subterranean tension, with dramatic gusts. In the third movement you feel the tone is more vulnerable, the colours almost drained.
I read once how Ades apparently used aligned cycles to provide harmonic, melodic and motivic material, and if this is another way of striving for conclusion, the third movement makes harmonic sense, if you can imagine it standing apart from the other two, it is sumptuous as played by Hadelich.
