Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift—an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head.
There is something otherworldly about the setting of The Variations, and its alien qualities are only enhanced by the occasional references that remind us we’re in contemporary England....For all The Variations’ unusual elements, Langley handles traditional storytelling modes expertly. He can nail a character in a few lines... He can do action. And he has a knack for ending chapters with the expertise of a theatrical director ramping up the tension and then—curtain!—dropping into silence....a book whose oddness stretches the reader without estranging us. It asks more questions than it answers, but provides plenty of delight to compensate.
Ecstasy is a word I’d happily associate with Patrick Langley’s lyrical and looping novel The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning ... And this is also a book about how to live, particularly how to live with a past that so conspicuously collides and fugues with the present. How to break free from sameness, to turn repetition into variation? The novel’s epigraph – 'Variation is among the oldest and most basic devices in music. It originates in an inherent tendency to modify identical recurrence' – is a quote from the American composer Leon Stein, and almost laughably banal when held up against Langley’s humming prose. But its message is clear: it is Nabokov’s magic carpet, that age-old human impulse that – like music – wants to modify, edit, exceed, transcend itself. With The Variations, Langley appears to be weaving a carpet of his own.
...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.
