BOOKS & ARTS
ness or the avoidance of colour, and from
his house to his hair he is daisy-white. He
has moved to this remote place because of
a woman and a girl. Yet ‘loving homage’ in
no way means a one-on-one correspond-
ence. Neither longtime inspirations nor his
own imagination fail Murakami here; Com-
mendatore is a perfect balance of tradition
and individual talent.
As well as Fitzgerald, William Faulkner
is a guiding presence here, along with a
host of other predecessors. The landscape
in Commendatore is a Japanese Yoknapa-
tawpha, where past and present, interior and
exterior consciousness, and art and life in
a recreational game with each other are the
setting, the characters and the plot.
Murakami’s narrator, a successful but
disaffected portraitist, realises as his mar-
riage falters that he wants his art to show
not smiling public faces but the skull, and
the soul, beneath the skin. The ancient rural
cottage he is borrowing belongs to a cel-
ebrated painter, Tomohiko Amada, who
studied European painting in Vienna in the
1930s, fell in love with a woman who was
later killed by the Nazis and escaped just in
time to Japan.
After the war, he re-emerged, adopting
an ancient Japanese technique and style.
Now 92 and fading into lifelessness, Amada
has been moved to a posh Tokyo care home,
but something of his spirit remains in his old
house and studio, along with one hidden
painting that tells a tremendous story. This
painting, ‘Killing Commendatore’, shows
that scene from Don Giovanni, and it also
lets the narrator, and us, imagine what befell
Amada and his loved ones during the sec-
ond world war.
Murakami has always loved writing
about other arts, and particularly music.
Killing Commendatore has opera as its
principal soundtrack, though increasingly
Bruce Springsteen’s The River album joins
in. Other sounds — the natural music of
a rustling, hooting night owl, the subter-
ranean knell of a long-buried bell — help
compose a novel that rings in one’s ears
as surely as does Gatsby, with its yellow
cocktail music, Klipspringer’s piano play-
ing, and those ‘muffled and suffocating
chords’ that fight their way up from the
Plaza ballroom.
Amidst such sensory stimulation, it’s no
wonder Murakami’s painter prefers to paint
from photographs; it’s easier than using a
life model and far safer than using one’s
own clouded and fearful memories. When
he relents, and begins to paint Menshiki
from life, a rupture ensues between real and
imagined. Which is the real world, anyway,
in artistic terms? Murakami’s artist relates
the act of painting to the literal illumina-
tion of ideas. To ‘discover this painting’, as
he puts it, is the task of beginning to create.
Nothing is painted there yet, but it’s more
than a simple blank space. Hidden on thatwhite canvas is what must eventually emerge.
As I look more closely, I discover various pos-
sibilities, which congeal into a perfect clue as
to how to proceed. That’s the moment I really
enjoy. The moment when existence and non-
existence coalesce.Murakami dancing along ‘the inky
blackness of the Path of Metaphor’ is like
Fred Astaire dancing across a floor, then
up the walls and onto the ceiling. No otherwriter so commands that manner of story-
telling wrought from a stream of rich ideas,
the thought-river, the word-hoard long used
and newly brought to life, flowing ‘along the
interstice between presence and absence’.Ravello
Luminous details!
Not my u n sightliness
twice corrected – you loving-stern,
when sick of t he for mless tee-shir t
by the Trevi, and the broken hat,you marched me to the camiceria...
Absurd Inglese of the long neck,
head-at-a-tilt to piano nobile
to see the city whole in harmony.We spiralled to Ravello
and there was nothing to do –
we stood helpless, in beachwear,
among the soprintindenza in Armaniwhen you slipped away,
a nd ret ur ned to me light
of step in the piazza
clothed in the petals of the iris,and the orchestra glowed on the sea;
Pogorelich, former firebrand
gone plump and bald, played
a comfortable Rach 2 – what matter?With you beside me
all the blues of all the Masters
came down and blended
and I did not see.— Stephen Romer
Murakami’s narrator wants his art to
show not smiling public faces but the
skull, and the soul, beneath the skinKidnapped by Kett
Andrew Taylor
Tombland
by C.J. Sansom
Macmillan, £20, pp.864Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its
length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor
epic disguised as a historical crime novel.
C.J. Sansom’s ‘Shardlake’ series, of which
this is the seventh episode, deals with the
activities of a hunchbacked lawyer in the
1530s and 1540s. The bloated old king is now
dead, and his son, Edward VI, a minor, rules
through the Lord Protector, his uncle Som-
erset. England is in a parlous state — verg-
ing on bankruptcy after a disastrous Scottish
war, uneasy with the new regime’s ultra-Prot-
estant policies and on the brink of civil unrest.
Shardlake has somehow managed to cling
to his integrity, despite having some danger-
ously high-profile clients. Among the latter is
the Lady Elizabeth, the 15-year-old daugh-
ter of Henry VIII’s disgraced queen Anne
Boleyn. Elizabeth despatches Shardlake to
Norwich, England’s second wealthiest city,
to monitor the trial for murder of a distant
cousin of her mother’s. John Boleyn has
been charged with the brutal murder of his
estranged wife.
Shardlake’s investigation is the central
thread of the novel, but its main purpose, in
terms of the plot, is to give him a reason to
be in Norwich in 1549. The city was the focus
of Kett’s rebellion, a large, well-organised
insurrection that defeated a royal army and,
for a few short weeks, controlled a large slice
of Norfolk.
This is Sansom’s real subject. Shardlake
is captured by the rebels. He lives among
them, effectively a prisoner on parole, in
their vast camp on Mousehold Heath over-
looking the city. Increasingly he comes to
understand their grievances — the wool
trade, source of the area’s wealth, has made
the rich much richer and the poor much
poorer. Shardlake is also sucked into the
topsy-turvy world of the camp, which he
finds as dangerous as the murder mystery
he continues to investigate.
Where Shardlake goes, so do we. San-
som has the trick of writing an enthralling
narrative. Like Hilary Mantel, he produc-
es densely textured historical novels that
absorb their readers in another time. He has
a PhD in history and it shows — in a good
way. He is scrupulous about distinguishing
between fact and fiction. (Typically, the last
60 pages of Tombland consist of a substantial
historical note and a bibliography.) He also
relishes the language of the time. It’s diffi-
cult not to warm to a book in which typical
insults are ‘you dozzled spunk-stain’ or ‘you
bezzled puttock’.
Is Tombland unnecessarily long? Prob-
ably, but I’m not complaining.