The Virtuoso: Sonia Orchard

As elegant and assured as its starring character, it seems astonishing that this pitch-perfect novel is the author’s first fictional outing. The Virtuoso is based on a real-life person, Australian pianist Noel Mewton-Wood – a friend and contemporary of the better-known Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.

Mewton-Wood was a depressive genius who mixed in the glamorous milieu of bohemian post-war London: he was charismatic, flamboyant and sharp-witted, as well as remarkably talented. Here, his life is obsessively chronicled by an admiring music student whose passionate affair with Mewton-Wood (who he’d long adored from afar) has transformed his life in a way that will last far longer than their relationship. As a boy watching a teenage Mewton-Wood perform, the transfixed, melancholy narrator instantly decides that ‘we were more alike than anyone else in the hall … He was playing for me, for the one person who knew and understood him’.

This classically unreliable narrator’s imagined communion with his idol is a running theme throughout the novel. Even during the brief period of time when fantasy and reality collide, the narrator’s dream world governs the real. The Virtuoso is a beguiling, beautifully evoked journey into the heart of romantic obsession; its central relationship and main characters expertly drawn. It seems amazing to the narrator that ‘this young boy with the ivory skin and the hands that played the sublime could rise when Britain was poised on the brink of national invasion’. This blend of beauty and darkness, potential and threat, epitomises The Virtuoso. I’ll leave the last word to Gail Jones: ‘A beautifully nuanced study of the intricate links between sexual desire and musical creativity – a moving‚ melancholy and deeply impressive debut.’