ABOUT halfway through this extraordinary book, the poet and librettist Michael Symmons Roberts declares that he is “an episodic”. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Galen Strawson, he suggests that, rather than experience life as a continuous unfolding narrative, a “journey”, he lives it as a series of discrete moments without a strong overriding sense of self persisting across time. For Symmons Roberts, being “episodic” comes as a revelation, a work of resistance to the dominant culture’s presiding myths.
This personal clarity offers a “way in” for the reader, too; for, while this book is, ostensibly, an extended study of Oliver Messiaen’s Modernist masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time and its lifelong impact on Symmons Roberts, it is as much a series of beautiful and tender interludes, seeming digressions and sidebars not only about a piece of music which will not let him go, but also about what constitutes a life. Memories of childhood and youth, as well as an unhurried interrogation of the grief generated by the author’s parents’ recent deaths, seep into Messiaen’s demanding music, and vice versa.
As Symmons Roberts acknowledges, this is not the book that he was planning to write. That book was meant to map some intersections between poetry and metaphysics: a worthy project, no doubt. But this book is more vulnerable and interesting. The eight sections of Messiaen’s Quartet offer a frame that holds Symmons Roberts’s reflections and save them from the sin of unregulated sincerity.
It is tempting to call this book a kind of theological memoir or autobiography — a study in Symmons Roberts’s recovery from atheism — but I suspect that would only infuriate him — not because he has no interest in faith: he is now a Roman Catholic — but because the label risks over-simplifying this book. It is, perhaps, better to read Quartet as a study in what persists in our disconcertingly contingent world. The sheer confidence and assurance of Messiaen’s masterwork — its Catholic apocalyptic vision leaves no room for doubt — means much to Symmons Roberts, and yet his doubt, his grief, and his chastened faith make him resist it.
Symmons Roberts is no professional musician. It makes this book all the more valuable and, when combined with his considerable lyric gifts as a poet, makes him a superb guide to the music, which lingers. It is a lonely book, sometimes painful to read. He reveals that, over the decades, he has created a sound archive to which he never listens. Like piles of photos, they are markers, a sign of memory never recalled, kept as if to say he has left a trace and paid attention to what Louis MacNeice called the “drunken plurality” of the world. A holy book, then, for a time that often feels miserably unholy.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, in the diocese of Manchester.
Quartet for the End of Time: On music, grief and birdsong
Michael Symmons Roberts
Jonathan Cape £20
(978-1-78733-185-3)
Church Times Bookshop £18
