FICTION
Music and Freedom
ZOE MORRISON
VINTAGE, $32.99
Music has the ability to capture and preserve moments in time, bringing back aspects of our experiences as we remember them: tastes, images, sounds, the touch of others. As we get older, many of us return to the songs we listened to earlier in our lives, especially our teenage years. A recent Catalyst special on the ABC, Music on the Brain, examined how personalised playlists can change the wellbeing, and even the brains themselves, of people with advanced dementia.
![Author Zoe Morrison.](/web/20161014145212im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/w/t/0/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grqhjy.png/1475766674711.jpg)
In Music and Freedom, Zoe Morrison looks at the power of music for connection and recollection, using it as a force to be reckoned with, a sign of both liberation and entrapment for her central character, Alice. A gifted pianist, she was wrenched from an orange orchard in regional Australia and transplanted to an English boarding school aged just seven. Her world is shaped by her love of music and the way it – like many of her family and friends – can abandon her when she needs help most.
To trace a life from beginning to end can be plodding but Morrison's fiction never falters. Her style sings and the structure revolves like a spiral staircase: the mind of an elderly woman trapped in her terrace in Oxford; the dusty beginnings with her struggling parents on the land in Currabin; a young woman bursting with plans as an elegant cad shows her the hidden spots of a university town; the idea of home and the possibilities of resurrection.
![<i>Music and Freedom</i> by Zoe Morrison.](/web/20161014145212im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/q/g/z/v/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.grqhjy.png/1475766674711.jpg)
With a background in piano performance, and research experience in social exclusion and violence against women, Morrison infuses the novel with an undercurrent of discordance and disturbance. Alice's husband, economics professor Edward, becomes a dictator as soon as they are married and she moves in; his contempt for her is absolute.
As Alice struggles with the reason for this change, the reader does too: there is no clarity, no motivation, just a cold, cruel, ruthlessness. As she is forced to sacrifice her hopes and talents one by one within the confines of Oxford University culture, the book examines the costs of a creative life for women – and how fear, anxiety, depression, crawl inward and are felt in the body, along with the physical abuse, when there's no other means of expression.
Milan Kundera writes of novels in musical terms: a part is a movement; a chapter is a measure; each part carries a musical indication, a tempo, that conveys an emotional expression. Instinctively, and by design, Morrison's novel brings all of these contrasting elements to perfect balance, creating a taut narrative with space between the lines.
While walls, both literal and figurative, are built between Alice and her family, the reader is given a chance to slowly tear them back down; a tender process. Morrison opens up access not just to the way Alice's mind works but how language can evoke classical music: a Bach prelude in the key of C suggests "morning sunshine, orange juice"; the Liszt a "skeleton of notes glued together, notes like long, curved bones". As Alice brings Beethoven, Bartok, Rachmaninoff, to life through her fingers, it sends me rushing to YouTube to watch the fingerings, listening to the music play out while I turn over the words in rhythm on the page.
As Alice becomes frail in old age, she begins a process of departure and withdrawal. She stops eating, starts to hear strange music in her head, and files musical compositions alphabetically by composer. But her most precious task, the one that keeps her moving, is a slow dismantling of her husband's library of precious and highly sought-after manuscripts.
As she holds each one to the flame – A New Theory of Capitalism, The Road to Serfdom – the shiny Steinway sits in the corner, a witness to this act and all that have come before, a final reminder of all that she has desired and the music her hands have lost the flexibility to play.
Kirsten Krauth's novel, just_a_girl, is published by UWA Publishing.