MixedTimes Literary Supplement\"...he is good on landscapes, architectural description, the fine gradations of colour. His is, to dust off T. S. Eliot’s distinction, a visual rather than an auditory imagination, which makes his decision to write a long novel with a composer at its centre both brave and quixotic. The attempts to sound the ghost voices of the past in the italicized irruptions of the second section are only fitfully effective, and the sound world of The Variations is in the main rather limited. There is not much tonal difference, for example, between the narrative voices of old Ellen and young Wolf, and while there is much discussion about music, the book itself rarely seems musical, much as it might wish to be.\
