- Paperback: 296 pages
- Publisher: Romarin (28 April 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0954335066
- ISBN-13: 978-0954335069
- Product Dimensions: 21 x 14 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,193,091 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Synopsis
"The Night Music" deals with adult fiction.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Superb Read,
By
This review is from: The Night Music (Paperback)
The Night Music is not an easy novel to classify as it doesn't fall into any typical literary genre. We first meet Ben, the son of an English father and a French mother, in the 1950s when he is thirteen years old and residing in an English boarding school.One night, while in bed in his dormitory, Ben is enchanted by haunting music being played downstairs and his fascination with the music and the musician, Claire, leads to a turbulent, passionate relationship. As Ben's rapport with Claire develops, we learn of his roots in provincial France and the novel takes us into a new phase in Ben's life when he re-establishes contact with his estranged mother. The Night Music is written in evocative language which captures the ecstasy and the anguish of youthful, forbidden love. It juxtaposes the innocence of Ben's childhood with the brutal consequences of him growing up too quickly and we share in the trials and tribulations of his troubled, teenage years. The Night Music is a complex novel which works on many levels. In the first half of the book, Christopher Campbell-Howes gives us a superb insight into life in an English boarding school - the peaks and troughs of emotional trauma, laced with subtle, biting humour, whereas in the second half, he portrays to perfection the rigours of day-to-day survival in rural France during the immediate post-war years. This is a book well worth reading.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book must become a best-seller!,
By
This review is from: The Night Music (Paperback)
This is a wonderful novel: one that it is difficult to classify. That 'it deals with adult fiction' sells it short. Yes, this is a 'grown up' book with all the maturity, insight, sensitivity, intelligence, humour and awareness that the writer shares with readers as precious gifts and then invites - even requires of them - in return. This novel should be read by a very wide range of people of all ages, genders, motivations, and backgrounds: those who are willing to be, as they read, sensitively, passionately and intelligently 'grown up'.Christopher Campbell-Howes' novel is centrally a love story, one with parallels to Shakespeare's story of young lovers. It is also much more than a love story, just as it is a love story set in different environments and in different times, and with many other impinging and stabilizing contexts: here there are joys and terrors, loneliness and relatedness, openness and limitation, pain and relief and then more pain, innocence and the continuation of innocence alongside and within its loss. The two main settings for this novel (Britain and France,)and the surprising new place at the end, draw us in and are totally believable, whether the reader knows or has experienced these environments or not. These places interact in magical ways with the characters, the events and the themes of the novel. They are amazingly different places and yet each one is so utterly right for what happens there and for the characters who are living, loving, hoping, fearing, suffering, despairing and experiencing joy there. Despite the massive shifts in the environment, and the revisiting of earlier times, and the contrast between the supporting minor characters in the British school and the French village, the narrative and the characterization hold together seamlessly - despite the shocks. This shows consummate skill in the control of the structure by the author, particularly as there is also more than one narrator. The two main characters, sometimes to the reader's surprise, do 'fit in' wherever they are, even though their environments are often harsh and rejecting of what is happening to them as a couple in love there. At times this novel is full of light and lightness of touch, with humour, hope and joy; at others is is searingly painful. It is one that I shall read many times and recommend to everyone I know who loves books, whoseeks to understand people, and who is willing to take risks with their emotions and their beliefs. I do hope that this novel will quickly reach a wide audience and become a best-seller. I also hope that soon there will be another novel from Christopher Campbell-Howes.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A terrific read,
By
This review is from: The Night Music (Paperback)
This is a book to be savoured. It is a beautifully written account of a great story which Mr Campbell-Howes tells with sensitivity, passion, poetry and humour.His main characters are funny, bright, musical and decent. They don't deserve exile in a squalid hillside farm, but were sent there as the only solution to an error of misjudgement. That was the era when such mistakes were considered intolerable and disgraceful, so they spent months in dirt, heat, cold and discomfort. The descriptions in the novel are an integral, evocative part of the whole. Without them, you cannot understand the story, and the poetry in them brings out the poetry, however unlikely it seems, in Claire and Ben's situation. Mr Campbell-Howes unravels the story of Ben's mother like reverse Origami patiently unpicking the layers. His skill as a writer comes out not only in use of language but in structure and the final twist resolving the initial question. His style is intellectual, drawing not only from a wide vocabulary but from a classical education. You can settle down to a good read; one that will transport you from the 50s boarding school environment with all that boys got up to, to the desolate cultural wasteland of the French peasant's farm. You will shudder and laugh, and enjoy the extent of the twists and turns of the story so expertly constructed. I hope his second novel is in progress.
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