The Big Music

Author(s): Kirsty Gunn

Novel

"The Big Music" tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him.
In this remarkable work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as magical as a dream. One emerges at the end of it altered and changed. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and know, "The Big Music" is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.

Highland piobaireachd bagpipe music gives its spacious looping structure to this novel of vast scope and breath-taking achievement. Octogenarian composer John Sutherland struggling across the landscape with a baby in his arms forms the opening 'ground' upon which the themes and variations of the rest of the book are developed: intergenerational torsion, the rigours of place, unbidden and unfulfillable hearts, the vast loneliness that arises from harmonics in relationships like the 'silences' created from the harmonics between the pipes' drones. Multivocal, fractalising, encyclopedic, Sutherland's 'Lament for Himself' induces its own way of reading, akin to musical listening. Conceived of as a box of documents, Gunn has produced a work of many skins, from the intimate to the documentary, and, if place impresses itself upon its inhabitants, has perhaps done for the cadences of Highland thought what James Kelman has done for those of demotic Glasgow. Repeatedly in her writing, Gunn performs what is known in piobaireachd as a ‘stag’s leap’: airborne, the reader covers the ground of the theme as the text plays hazardously against it. 


{THOMAS}


Product Information

A story about family, love and the power of the imagination.

BOOK OF THE YEAR and Fiction category winner -New Zealand Post Book Awards 2013 What the judges said: "Gunn sets herself what for many would be impossible challenges and then meets every one of them brilliantly - not least making bagpipe compositions sound so musically and intellectually stimulating that all of us are firm converts."

Kirsty Gunn published her first novel with Faber in 1994 and since then has written five works of fiction, including short stories and a collection of fragments, essays and meditations. Translated in over twelve territories, and widely anthologised, her books have been broadcast, turned into film and dance theatre, and are the recipient of various prizes and awards, including the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. A regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines, she is also Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, where she established and directs the writing programme. She lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters.

General Fields

  • : 9780571282340
  • : Faber & Faber
  • : Faber & Faber
  • : 0.381
  • : September 2013
  • : 198mm X 126mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Kirsty Gunn
  • : Paperback
  • : Reprint
  • : English
  • : 823.92
  • : 496