ABSTRACT
In his review of Vikram Seth’s novel An Equal Music 1 the critic Tim Parks argues that the author has failed to live up to the ambition implied in the title. 2 Evidently, Seth’s aim is not only to configure the vicissitudes of life into a plausible plot – the average procedure of a novel – but also to transcend them in an experience that is, almost, beyond description yet part of the novel. No wonder that it is music that is supposed to do the trick, romantically to be taken as the one medium that does not suffer from constraints in the way language does. In a final episode Seth’s deaf heroine can be seen playing the violin in so sublime a fashion as to touch upon the unimaginable and have the title of the book come true:
There is no forced gravitas in her playing. It is a beauty beyond imagining – clear, lovely, inexorable, …the unending “Art of Fugue”. It is an equal music.
