It is winter 1518 in Strasbourg and a woman sings alone in a public square, her gestures wild and unruly as she wails. Despite accusations of insanity and witchcraft, she doesn’t stop. Eventually, a small crowd of others chime in: men and women with “voices by turns erratic and monotonous, bleating, shouting, nasaling, howling,” making noise together in the falling snow.
The opening of The Variations (New York Review of Books, 2024), the second novel by the British writer Patrick Langley, riffs on an actual occurrence: the Dancing Plague of 1518. Crowds would break out in movement that went on for months, a kind of proto-rave or group contagion, diagnosed as “demonic possession” or “mass psychogenic disorder” depending on the era. In the context of the novel, this scene sets the stage for “the gift”: a capacity to hear ancestral voices and sounds that manifests, in its inheritors, as something between genius and madness, a virtue to be cultivated or an illness that leads one off course.
Both blessing and curse, the gift’s ultimate meaning remains a mystery. “What is the gift?” asks Ellen, a character who narrates the anecdote of the singing woman. “I of all people should know, or at least have a plausible well-rehearsed answer. I don’t. Or I have too many. Depending on when you ask me, they are prone to change.” Like a piece of music or genetic code, the gift changes over time and according to who is experiencing it. Langley’s novel traces the shifts.
The book is organized into three main parts: one for each of three characters—Ellen, Wolf, and most centrally Selda—grappling with the mysterious inheritance. Ellen is a descendent of the singing woman and dean of St. Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children–part-music school, part-mental health ward, and her alma mater. Her own gift is as stable as she is self-composed, though she wonders at what cost: “Had I absorbed ancestral memory into every fibre of my being, as the texts and my teachers had promised I could, or had I censored it and in doing so both flattered and diminished myself?”
Ellen’s section, relatively brief, gives way to Wolf’s. He is the twenty-something grandson of Ellen’s school friend Selda, newer to the gift, and struggling with it more acutely. In him, the ancestral trait manifests as a bawdy, taunting chorus, formatted by Langley in italicized fragments as if to highlight a break in linear thought: “♬they sing in your head/the merry old dead♬,” “♬what a palaver!/sang the dancing cadaver♬.”
At times Wolf engages with the voices, mumbling out loud; at times he drowns them out with pills; and when, one winter night, they become too much for him, he appears at the Hospice, falling on all fours and howling lines from Selda’s sonata, Snow Trio.
By eerie coincidence, Selda has recently died in the snow, a mysterious episode that leaves the others searching for answers about her life and fate. The final section is more or less Selda’s biography. A renowned composer, born in Coventry during the Blitz of WWII (in this she shares much in common with the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire), she has spent the last years of her life living in seclusion on the coast of Cornwall. There, she listens to the gift, which in her case takes the form of music, and pursues it to the bitter end.
One of the novel’s underlying questions is whether the pursuit is worth it. “Gift,” of course, is another word for talent, and in courting hers, Selda is like any artist chasing a voice, a note, an image–trying to “get it down.” But her devotion to music carries emotional consequences. Particularly strained are her relationships –including with Ellen, who, it becomes clear, loved Selda as more than a friend, and with Selda’s rationally-minded daughter, Anya, from whom she is intermittently estranged.
Still, Selda acknowledges the paradox, that even as it drives her away from loved ones, music becomes her way of communicating with them across distance and time. Snow Trio describes a mother and daughter alone in winter, and it’s very much on her mind on the evening of her death:
Was Snow Trio a premonition? No, it came from the gift, her distant ancestral past. But the piece, her final work—it isn’t finished. Then it hits her. It will never be finished, will never end. . . . She hears something then. A clear high note. It could be out there in the world, or there, in the gift. How unlike her to draw that distinction: the two, of course, inhabit the same earth. She knows what it tells her, though. It is a message. A reminder. Others are out there.
She tells herself that sound is coming from “her grandson, [he] is making it. He is somewhere beyond these walls, in the storm and the silence it brought.” She steps outside and sees “a figure moving across the fields.” Believing it is Wolf, she braves the screeching elements with “something to tell him.”
What drives our need to communicate? Whether it’s the noise of a “discomposed or decomposing universe . . . its harmonies marred by bombs and death-camps . . . ,” or the more intimate but no less jarring rupture of birth, the novel points to a dissonance at the heart of existence that its characters attempt to make sense of, reaching for connection with whatever tools they have. For Ellen, this means nurturing the students at St. Agnes’s; for Wolf, it means understanding his genealogical past; and for Selda, of course, it is song.
In what might be read as a moment of meta-reflection on Langley’s book, Selda muses, “What form might her last piece take? A grand and overarching composition that ties everything together, or a simple and pared-back song, a kind of ballad, that will linger in the mind?” Langley’s is a masterful novel, grand and overarching, with sentences beautifully pared. At times it seems almost too finely tuned, and one wonders what would happen if it broke from linearity (the sentences themselves are linear, even as the plot moves back and forth in time) to take even greater formal risks.
At its best, Langley’s novel operates like one the bells Ellen uses to help Wolf and the other youth of St. Agnes’s: “The pitch heard in bells is virtual. It is generated inside the listener’s head, an impression of something which is not there, frequencies surrounding an absence.” In a novel that revolves around absence—Selda’s from the lives of those who love her, Wolf’s when he goes missing to track her down—the best parts reverberate like a chorus, three voices leaving a ghost of sound.
In his acknowledgments, Langley points to one of his book’s literary ancestors: H.D.’s The Gift. Written in response to the Blitz by a woman who lived with another woman and narrates from the perspective of a child lost in her own gift, reading it offers an exciting counterpoint to Langley’s novel. Pairing the two together, one finds a mesmerizing call-and-response through space and a near-century of time.
