Rose Tremain's latest work is a sensitive look at love in wartime.
THE GUSTAV SONATA
Rose Tremain
Penguin Random House
I am sure many readers will welcome British writer Rose Tremain's new novel. Winner of many book prizes over her years of writing, including the Orange Prize for The Road Home and The Whitbread Novel of the Year for Music and Silence, she is an established author of great books.
In this new novel, she follows the life of two young boys brought up in wartime Switzerland, which in addition to being rather nervously neutral, has an embedded culture of self-mastery, which involves not succumbing to feelings.
Five-year-old Gustav lives with his embittered mother Emilie in poverty, his father is dead. He has only one toy, a metal train with faces of passengers painted on the window. Yet he loves his mother, who cannot love him.
If this sounds grim, Rose Tremain manages to bring this little boy to life, enjoying as he does looking after the silkworms at his nursery school, and befriending a new boy, Anton.
Anton is Jewish, and a musical prodigy, whose loving and ambitious parents take Gustav under their wing and encourage the friendship. Neither Anton nor Gustav make other friends.
The story goes back in time to look at the history of Gustav's mother and father, filling out the story of Emilie's embittered nature, as well as the story of Jew's frantic efforts to enter Switzerland in the late 1930s.
Anton continues to develop musically, but cannot manage his extreme nervousness when in front of large audiences. When he moves away to record Beethoven sonatas, Gustav is devastated, as Anton does not really keep good contact.
Tremain is at her greatest, I think, when bringing out the many sensitivities, endurances and capacities for love or not in the many characters, male and female in this great story.
Margaret Bannister is a retired Dunedin psychotherapist and science teacher.
