Book reviews: The Instrumentalist, by Harriet Constable | Mary and the Rabbit Dream, by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

Harriet Constable’s new novel is pinned to one Anna Maria della Pietà, but the target is Antonio Vivaldi. Stravinsky supposedly quipped that Vivaldi did not write 400 concertos, he wrote one concerto 400 times. This fiction claims he might not even have written all the work attributed to him. Anna Maria was a real historical figure, an orphan “deposited” into the care of the nuns at the Ospedale in Venice, where she was given a musical education. She would become maestra of the figlie di coro, though here she insists on being referred to as maestro, since talent trumps gender. The historical Anna Maria lived into her eighties, but the novel loses interest in her before middle age. The essence of the novel is stifled female creativity. It is not contentious that Anna Maria was a famous player; whether she inspired or co-wrote Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza or The Four Seasons is a moot point. Constable does refer to the letter from one student at the Pietà having to compose in the style of Vivaldi, but does not refer to the incomplete manuscript scores by Vivaldi and others in the diary papers of Chiara, another Pietà student.

What hobbles the novel is the cliché. For one thing, Anna Maria has the rather fashionable condition of synaesthesia: “The sound is liquid, gleaming, sublime… no longer simple one colour, but a thousand shades of gold and auburn and maroon. A soul come to life”. (It may be pedantic, but I thought the point of souls was they were alive?) There is much more in a similar key. When the infant Anna Maria is found, a central-casting wise nun remarks, “I have a feeling about this one”, and whatever her premonition Anna Maria outdoes it in arrogance. After one instance of selfishness – concerning the death of their friend – one character says “Some things are more important than music you know!” to which she replies “No, they’re not! It is the reason. It is everything… I’m going to be the best. This is what it takes”.

Vivaldi, whose red hair is constantly noticed as if the reader forgot, is a fine enabler. “People think greatness just happens to you. It does not. You have to work at it: you have to work so very hard for it… you cannot trust other people. Not when you have talent such as yours”. Frankly, the Red Priest might as well have channelled Lydia from Fame: “You've got big dreams, you want fame. Well fame costs, and right here is where you start paying; in sweat”. But hold on: it morphs into Glee. After a flurry of plot (mother’s identity, sequestration, friend in adolescent trouble, close shaves after running away) Anna Maria somehow captures the loyalty of all the girls on whom she had stood ascending the ladder of success, and they have discovered that “each of us is special… we are angels, or miracles, or gifts from God. Because we work hard. Because we care”. So “her” orchestra plays their own music, which is one in the eye for Antonio the Fiddler, who, red-faced as well as red-haired, promptly skedaddles with a new underage protégé. The sisters have done it for themselves. This is not really historical fiction, but contemporary concerns in fancy-dress.

Mary Toft in Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s sad, wry and haunting novel Mary and the Rabbit Dream does not want to be famous. In fact, she would very much like to be left alone, after her mother-in-law, an intermittent midwife, tells people she is giving birth to rabbits. Various male medical professionals are called in, and she becomes more than a six-day wonder, with even the King taking in an interest. This being the 18th century, part of what is under investigation is enlightenment itself. Of course she can’t be birthing bunnies, but how can it be proved?

Kiss-Deáki does sketch in some theories about poaching, food economics and class resentment, but Mary remains a necessarily silent figure, until a riotous and fictional ending where she makes her mind known in appropriately bawdy style. It is the prose style, however, that makes this stand out. The prose is both spaced and paced, and often uses a rhetorical agglutination, with a phrase repeated and expanded: for example “And Mary Toft has no opinion. / Mary Toft has suffered too much to have an opinion. / Mary Toft has been listened to too little her whole life to have the courage to form any opinions of her own. / And now she has no opinions. Not even if she tried. / She has suffered too much”. Ironically, this is far more musical than anything in The Instrumentalist.

The surrealism, indignity and venality of Mary and the Rabbit Dream, regrettably, means it is more pressing and relevant historical fiction that The Instrumentalist dusting down elective ancestors as spoilt role models.

The Instrumentalist, by Harriet Constable, Bloomsbury, £16.99. Harriet Constable is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 and 20 August. Mary and the Rabbit Dream, by Noémi Kiss-Deáki, Galley Beggar Press, £10.99