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Posted on 23 Oct 2014 in Fiction | 1 comment

RICHARD POWERS Orfeo. Reviewed by Virat Nehru

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orfeo2This sophisticated meditation on the nature of genius was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Richard Powers is primarily a philosopher who’s managed to disguise himself as a literary novelist. He sets up his literary canvases as projects of philosophical investigation where central characters often take a back seat to metaphysical dilemmas. His last novel, Generosity: An Enhancement (2009), dealt with the ordeal of Thassa Amzwar, an Algerian refugee who had hyperthermia seemingly encoded in her genes. However, a few pages in you understand that the story isn’t about Amzwar at all. Amzwar is just a catalyst for Powers to set up his real narrative: a disturbing exposition of the moral and ethical quandaries that come to light when human life is reduced to being the subject of experimentation.

Similarly, Galatea 2.2 (1995) may have introduced us to a hyper-real version of the author Richard Powers, but the narrative focus was never on the central character. He ended up being a rather convenient vehicle for an examination of the philosophical ramifications of the Pygmalion myth. Even The Echo Maker (2006) – arguably his best-known novel – works more effectively as a commentary on cognitive science and neurology than as the story of a man trying desperately to put together the pieces of his past.

And now, Powers has given us Orfeo, which in a way makes amends for all the neglect of central characters in his past work in favour of larger philosophical issues. Orfeo is Powers’s most character-centric work in quite a while. This is very much the story of Peter Els – a geriatric and misanthropic composer – the titular anti-Orpheus, whose quest for perfection leads him into dire circumstances.

We first meet Els as a 70-year-old recluse who has dialled 911 after the death of his dog, Fidelio. Through Fidelio, Els’s steadfast companion, Powers establishes from the beginning that Els has been living in his self-imposed exile for quite some time. The search for perfection, symmetry and overall beauty in people has left him in despair. No human being could live up to the standard that Els had in mind. Only Fidelio – who had a peculiar ear for Els’s technically perfect but aesthetically repellent musical compositions – stood by him:

The dog answered only to Fidelio, from the moment Els first used the name. Music launched her into ecstasies. She loved long, held intervals, preferably seconds, major or minor. When any human sustained a pitch for more than a heartbeat, she couldn’t help joining in … In the creature’s howling, Els heard the roots of music – the holy society of small discord.

The police arrive and are somewhat alarmed by the state of Els’s house. He’s converted it into a kind of do-it-yourself bio-laboratory. His search for perfection has led him to bio-composing – his goal is to encode within the DNA of common bacteria the skeleton of a musical composition. Perfection appears to be synonymous with immortality for Els. Species of common bacteria have been around for centuries and will most likely outlast most living organisms.

This personal project makes Els come across as intensely self-serving. The search for immortality, though scientifically and intellectually a goal worthy of pursuit, is also indicative of a lack of social empathy. It validates the perception that you are rightfully the centre of the universe.

Perhaps, from a completely cerebral point of view, such a validation might actually be true for Els. He is the sort of composer for whom the word ‘difficult’ would be an understatement. Among his accomplishments are – a piece that has no fixed tonality, a 12-hour chamber ballet about the life of philosopher Fyodorov, and a string quartet based on probability and Markov chains. His magnum opus is The Fowler’s Snare, an opera inspired by the Munster Rebellion of 1534.

Through the character of Els, Powers is able to systematically deconstruct the rather glamorous and aesthetically pleasing misconception of the nature of ‘genius’ in popular culture. It is only fitting that Powers would engage with this, given that he’s been the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, which is colloquially known as the ‘Genius Grant’, but Powers’s notion of genius, though intellectually tantalising, is socially and aesthetically repulsive. The genius of Els is based on the Faustian principle – in gaining cerebral veracity, Els sacrifices a genuine human connection with the people around him. He chooses the intellectual satisfaction of composing over raising a family. His wife divorces him and he struggles to reconnect with his daughter, Sara:

Els still saw them often, his wife and daughter. But Maddy was no longer his wife, and six months on, Sara had fled to some farther, imaginary planet … On his third visit after the separation, he asked the sullen child for the latest news from Umber. He always did. It was like asking how things were with her friends.

A bio-hazard threat sees Els wrongly accused of being a bio-terrorist. The narrative weaves back and forth, splitting the plot into two storylines. On one hand, the reader follows the question of whether Els is able to evade the authorities and fulfil his project of immortality. On the other, we gradually find out how Els became the estranged misanthrope that he is today, one who very closely resembles the existentially tormented Professor Isak Borg from the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries.

Powers’s knowledge of music is exceptional and his ability to express the technicality of music through the lyrical beauty of prose is fine-tuned. However, the lengthy passages that elucidate the intricacies of musical composition do test your patience as a reader at times. In saying that, the very same passages play an essential part in delineating the cerebral, but ultimately socially unbearable quality to Els’s character:

The work was for chamber orchestra, lush with melodies that everyone in the audience would leave the hall humming. It contained just enough passing dissonance to reassure listeners that it had heard rumours about the previous century … At twenty-five, Els would have found the thing insipid and reactionary. At seventy, he wished he’d written it at twenty-five.

There are no chapter numbers or section breaks. Instead, the narrative is divided by tweets of 140 characters that Els sends out so that the world can know his story as he’s persecuted by the authorities. From this unconventional structure, to the constant back and forth between the two parallel storylines and the indulgence in expressing the complexities of music, Orfeo is quite a challenging book to navigate as a reader. However, that is precisely the point. The way the novel is organised – the disjointed anecdotes, the details of musical technicality and a blatant disregard for the reader’s sensibilities by not providing an easy-to-navigate narrative, all serve to reinforce the characteristics of Peter Els. The difficulties for the reader in getting through the novel parallel the social antipathy of the novel’s protagonist.

Loyal readers of Powers will find a consistent narrative focus on the protagonist a refreshing change compared to his previous work. Though at times it can be ‘difficult’, much like Els himself, in the capable hands of Richard Powers, Orfeo is a sophisticated meditation on the nature of genius.

Richard Powers Orfeo Atlantic Books 2014 PB 384pp $22.99

Virat Nehru is an undergraduate student at Sydney University and a freelance journalist. He tweets at @6thrat

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

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1 Comment

  1. This is a necessarily sophisticated review for a complex book and it has prepared me well to tackle this novel. I think without this review I might not engage in the early stages with the novel which may well be a work of genius. I also know someone who is the ideal person to give this book to: its definitely on my Xmas list for him, but is it on my Xmas list: I’m not sure.