My favourite book of last year was a product of this course, and The Chimes by fellow VU graduate Anna Smaill is definitely top of my list for 2015.
Set in a dystopian future England, after an unspecified crisis known as the Allbreaking, Smaill presents a society in which music rather than words are the organising principle of life.
Reading and writing have been banned and people have lost the ability to form long-term memories.
Although important moments can be intentionally captured through association with specific physical items (objectmemories), such recollections are fleeting and exist in isolation from each other and cannot be threaded into a coherent narrative from which individual or collective history can be constructed.
In its place people's lives are harmonised and structured by the twice daily playing of the Carillion, a massive organ built, maintained and composed for by a group of master musicians called the Order.
The story is told through the eyes of a teenaged boy called Simon, a member of a gang that scavenges London's sewers and the muddy Thames for palladium, the metal that forms the Carillion's heart.
As one day blends into another, he is initially content to be carried by the great organ's point and counterpoint, and by the tunes that guide his passage through the tunnels beneath the city.
But nagging at the back of his mind is another melody, one that reminds him that he came to the city with another purpose.
Assisted by Lucien, the blind and charismatic young man who leads their troop, Simon slowly learns to retain and structure the events imbedded in both his own and others' objectmemories to recover both his original assignment and the true story of the Allbreaking, knowledge that precipitates a desperate attempt to topple the Order and reclaim the past for humanity.
As engaging as I found the plot and the ideas the story explores, what truly captured me was its lyricism.
Although this is her first novel, Smaill is also a poet and trained musician, and these sensibilities suffuse the writing.
From the patter-song of trade to the mnemonic melodies that serve in lieu of physical maps and the orchestral gestures - solfrange - that people use to supplement the spoken word, her language and imagery are littered with musical terms both real and invented (subito, pace, tacet, blasphony).
Initially unfamiliar, they soon came to feel almost as natural to me as a reader as for her characters and eventually completely enveloped me in her world's timeless melange.
The Chimes is already being spoken of as a potential Booker contender and I can see why.
• Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
