Piano Angel
by Esther Woolfson
Two Ravens Press, 280pp, £9.99BEHIND THE SCENES OF A NOVEL are many people. The writer may be on the front page, along with the publisher, but there are marketing folk, art directors, sales st
aff and publicity, all working to ensure a book's success, and who are generally unseen. The greatest "unseen" of them all, yet perhaps the most important presence, is the editor. A bad editor can kill a book, a good editor can save it, or elevate it to a real work of art.
I begin with this point because it's the most important one in the production of Esther Woolfson's first novel. From this book, it's clear to see that she's an intelligent and sensitive writer. She's also been ambitious with her debut, covering the subjects of terminal illness, emigration, the siege of Budapest. She ranges widely from New York to Glasgow, to London and Hungary. And she has an intimate story to tell of two brothers, and their relationship with a woman refugee.
And yet I found myself reading this novel, not like a critic but like an editor, poised with a red pen over the pages. So many things in place, yet so many things going wrong and needing correction. If ever a novel cried out for a firm editorial hand, this is it. Woolfson's plot is not the problem so much, as she keeps it relatively simple: we open, crucially, in "late autumn 2001" (nods to 9/11 are going to take place in novels for quite a while; we might as well get used to it). Daniel is visiting the house in Glasgow where his brother, Mark, spent his last days. Mark lived in New York for much of his life, but returned to his native city towards the end of his terminal illness. Woolfson then switches from Daniel's emotions and first person account, detailing how he is coping with the loss of his brother, to Mark's third person one, set almost two years previously, from the moment he learns about his fate.
Both narratives sound identical, which is reasonable as they are brothers. But they have a particular voice: overly lyrical, self-conscious, too aware of the beauty of the words. Woolfson commits all the basic errors a good creative writing course would have hammered out of her, and that a good editor would have excised. She luxuriates in repetition – if she writes it once, she writes it at least three times. A writer can get away with this maybe once or twice in a book, but not nine times in a single page: "... whose situation is universal, poignant, worthy of sympathy ... There never was innocence or shock or disbelief ... immune from harm, immune from the world, immune from the blatant act of being human ... it is a taste to be remembered, complex and redeeming ... who he must tell, inform, advise." Tautology is a bad habit (what's the difference between "tell" and "inform"?), it stands out, horribly (and poor grammar doesn't help).
Extraneous detail is another problem. After Mark has received his diagnosis, he goes to a cafe. Woolfson spends a great deal of time establishing that he sits down, that he speaks to the waitress, that he puts his medical diagnosis on the table, etc. This might just have been acceptable if she wanted to emphasise his shock at the news. But then she describes the goings-on of the cafe, in all their banality: "It is a popular place, one where people look in and look out. They gaze from either side of the window, wave, gesticulate silently through the glass. Often, a friend will break off from an intended route and come in, as he does himself, weaving through the closeness of tables and waiters and stands of fancy breads. It is a place where business is done, future promises made, ideas presented, pieces of gossip handed out as prizes."
Giving space to the mundane purpose of a cafe (I think we all know what it's for) is only justifiable if it provides some special insight. But where is the unusual, the unfamiliar? What are we being told that we don't already know? It's not so much the telling of her story that is Woolfson's problem, but the manner in which it is being told. The later insertion of post-war Hungarian history simply compounds this problem, because that's exactly how it's presented: as a history lesson. There is a lot to be told here, but it's told in completely the wrong way.
A good editor would have cut this book down by two-thirds, and told Woolfson to rewrite. Two Ravens have a non-editing policy, which, on the strength of this novel, is a policy they need to change, and fast. This novel is simply not ready for the market, and handing it over, unedited, in this way, may even have done Woolfson's nascent career as a novelist some harm.
