Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review by Walter Cummins
Music Against the Night is a fictional biography imagining the emotional lives of two real people—John Field and Adelaide Percheron—who are known for their roles in musical history, although there is much more information about Field. While constrained by established external facts about their circumstances, Yayun Li uses her talents to imagine what it was like to be these two people, depicting the workings of their consciousnesses far beyond all that is available from the biographical data.
The physical settings of their lives are essential for understanding the roles their fates gave them. Li is convincingly rich in establishing the details and feel of what it was like to live at the turn of the nineteenth century, primarily in European cities but also during Adelaide’s early years in Pondicherry, India, where she got the nickname Percherette, the designation Li uses throughout. The two end up in Russia, essentially by accident, far from where they came from and where they have ties. In fact, there is no place they really belong
While reading I kept wondering why Li gave so much thought to these two out of all those who have lived at that time in history. Her skill is evident on every page, verifying why she has won a Pulitzer Prize, received a Macarthur genius grant, and garnered other awards. With so many strengths, why dd she apply them to Field and Percherette? (Apparently, this novel is the first of a trilogy about the two.) Most likely it is the themes they illustrate.
Her voice as an omniscient narrator dominates, offering commentary and judgments through tone and aphorisms, not unlike the Victorian masters. Here’s one example: “A woman easy to love was never truly loved, though it mattered little now. Let the Muscovites say what they wished about the widow absent at the funeral. People could be generous when they chose to, but more often they were cruel.”
The novel shifts between sections devoted to each person, with only occasional references to their unhappy time together when Percherette was John’s student, mistress, and then wife, finally taking their child and abandoning John in reaction to his blatant alcoholism and habitation with a mistress. Those revelations come out in brief flash forwards revealing what will would happen to people in their futures. (The novel’s very first sentence has Percherette learning of John’s death.) Li is free to do so because the full lives are known from their biographies. There is no opportunity for narrative surprises. That opening also places an initial focus on how and why something happened rather than what will happen.
Almost all of the detailed scenes dramatize John and Percherette in their teens, compelled to confront life issues far beyond their years. While others are around them, they lack a sympathetic guidance and must navigate their situations in a mental isolation.
But what is the novel really about? Why is Li telling their stories? The title—Music Against the Night—is a strong indicator of themes. Music is inseparable from the lives of the two, both identified as prodigies, dominating John more so because of his extensive training. But that music is continual conflict with a metaphoric nocturnal darkness.
That darkness is manifested in the prevalence of death and isolated loneliness. So many babies fail to survive infancy, including never-known siblings, along with the deaths of parents and friends. Survival is a rarity. Both John and Percherette lose those they are closest to in their teens, friends engaged with a mixture of rivalry and affection, but necessary as close companions. John’s George Pinto dies at twenty and Percherette’s Fortunée at sixteen.
These losses are symptomatic of their essential aloneness. Percherette has no lasting family, her father and grandmother deceased, her mixed raced heritage a source of rejection. John is loses contact with his family when sent to a musical tutor. His father, an orchestra violinist, is distant and cold, his brother disappears, his sister becomes a maid with one brief encounter for the rest of their lives, his longed-for mother unreachable.
And what of being a prodigy? Both have their moments, John more than Percherette, as a performer and composer, creator of the nocturn form that Chopin mastered. But for all his hours and hours of musical absorption he becomes forgotten, an obscure figure by the time he dies in his early fifties.
Ultimately, this is a grim novel, the stories of two lost people made convincingly unique by Li. Percherette shows more energy and spirit than John, but all for little. Neither can realize the self they longed for. Music does not save them from the night.
