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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I play music, I compose it, I don't do anything else. I mean, I don't know how to have coffee with someone.", 7 Oct 2007
(4.5 stars) With symbolism from the Orpheus myth reverberating throughout her novel, Australian author Janette Turner Hospital pulls out all the stops, creating a psychologically intense study of the relationship between Michael "Mishka" Bartok, a PhD candidate at Harvard who is the son of Hungarian Jews now living in rural Australia, and Leela-May Moore, a PhD candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mishka, a gifted violinist, singer, and more recently, a player of the oud, a lute-like instrument from the Middle East, has never known his father, knowing only that he is an oud-player from Lebanon. Leela is the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher from tiny Promised Land, South Carolina.
When Leela meets Mishka for the first time, he is playing his violin in the subway, "the underworld of the Red Line" between Harvard Square and Boston's Park Street Station. Mesmerized, she quickly becomes his lover, sharing his musical life. Enrapt by their young love, Mishka and Leela pay scant attention to terrorist acts which have occurred in New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. When a suicide bomber attacks the Prudential Tower in Boston, however, their lives change, becoming chaotic when a bomb explodes on the MBTA Red Line. Mishka has been away from home on both occasions, "playing in the Music Lab," he says.
As the novel moves back and forth between the lives of Mishka and Leela in Cambridge and their childhoods in Australia and South Carolina, the reader comes to understand what motivates them and how they are tied to the mysteries of their pasts. Mishka, yearning to learn more about his father, has made connections with the Middle Eastern community and the mosque in Harvard Square. Leela's past comes back to haunt her when she is subjected to agonizing questioning about Mishka by an intelligence service run by Cobb Slaughter, a former friend from Promised Land who has been a Special Forces major in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the tension ratchets up, the reader becomes totally involved in the conflict between reality and illusion. The Orpheus myth is turned upside down when Mishka disappears and Leela must find and rescue him from "the underworld." Hospital is a writer with rare gifts for creating suspense and a compelling narrative. The clear Orpheus symbolism is enhanced by frequent references to the music of Gluck and other western composers who have celebrated the Orpheus myth. Filled with rich action scenes related to contemporary issues, wonderful images, and themes dealing with illusion and reality, the ways our pasts govern our present, the importance of our parents in the shaping of our lives, and the prices we are willing to pay for love, Orpheus Lost captures the nightmarish present, relates it to individual pasts, and forecasts the "costly dues" that one must pay for one's "heart's desire" in the future. n Mary Whipple
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by Janette Turner Hospital
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