Strung out in New York
Saturday June 03 2006
By Tenderwire By Claire Kilroy Faber, st£10.99
Cora Venus Lunny Claire Kilroy is the acclaimed young author of All Summer, described in The Times as 'compelling ... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', which won the 2004 Rooney Prize. Educated at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin.
Her new novel, Tenderwire, is in similar territory, a gripping rollercoaster ride through a young Irish violinist's emotional world. Set against the background of a freezing, grey, slushy New York, Kilroy never lets up on the thematic sustain in the story which takes in Eva Tyne's disaster-ridden concerto debut, her sudden descent into alcoholism, and her obsessive quest to buy a beautiful Stradivarius (... or is it?) violin from a shady Russian (... or is he?) she meets in a bar.
The atmosphere of mystery and psychological tension is set from the prologue - and the first page of the story focuses into first-night nerves in lurid colour and sharp detail.
As you would expect with any work of fiction dealing with such a specialised subject, there are a few little technical holes here and there - for example: you don't get violins tuned like you do a piano; and the identification of old fine Italian stringed instruments by their unique little scratches, bumps and measurements, quite independent of whether they have a special inlaid decoration, is a long-established element in the craft of a violin dealer - but these didn't detract from the strong storyline for this reader, especially as so many of the themes resounded so closely within me.
Any book set in NYC in the wintertime tugs my heartstrings: combined with the Shostakovich and Vivaldi violin concertos, the quest for a beautiful, possibly unattainable violin, the few dips too deep into the vodka bottle - I started to suspect, in true narcissist-violinist fashion, that my friends and I had been followed around from bar to bar and used as inspiration.
This book is firmly nestled in my collection of favourite violin fiction, right between Vikram Seth's An Equal Music and Paulo Maurensig's Canone Inverso (all firmly under my DVD of The Red Violin...)
The story easily transcends its slightly obscure subject matter: no knowledge of the violin is required to enjoy the protagonist's chase after something she covets.
It is a love/pursuit story between a woman and an idea, an ideal; this love is at once maternal, obsessive, impure, driven and romantic. The sensitivity with which Kilroy treats the protagonist's psychological issues and spiral into self-destruct reminds one of a bow being very delicately drawn across a string.
Her characters are altogether realistic and entirely human: Eva's voice is a tomboyish breath of fresh air, she is narcissistic and kind and selfish and tender and absurd all at once; her best friend revealing herself, as so often they do in real life, to be less than the faithful companion she presents herself as.
Tenderwire should appeal to anyone looking for an enjoyable, suspenseful read with somewhat more depth and literacy than your average airport thriller. Kilroy's prose has a rare elegance and refinement, and is interestingly lacking in the thick peppering of regional linguistic idiom so rife among other Irish writers of her generation - all of which mark her out as a young author very much worth watching.
