279-] English Literature, Andrew Crumey

279- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey 's Novels 

Beethoven's Assassins

Beethoven's Assassins is a novel by Andrew Crumey, nominated by publisher Dedalus Books for the 2023 Booker Prize. It imagines Beethoven being commissioned by a masonic lodge to write an opera about the Order of Assassins, called "The Assassins, or Everything is Allowed". The opera's subtitle comes from "Nothing is true and everything is allowed", which was the Assassins' secret doctrine according to Beethoven's acquaintance Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall.

The novel has multiple storylines set in different time periods with real-life characters including Therese van Beethoven (wife of Nikolaus Johann van Beethoven), Anton Schindler, J.W.N. Sullivan and Katherine Mansfield. The storylines vary in tone from comic to serious.

The first storyline is narrated by Beethoven's sister-in-law Therese and is comic. The second is narrated by a modern-day professor writing an article about "Beethoven and Philosophy". His work is interrupted by the pandemic and he starts writing about the troubles of his elderly parents during lockdown. After the pandemic he goes to a writing retreat in a Scottish country house where he resumes the Beethoven article.

There are other storylines set in the same house at different times. In 1823 the house is owned by a retired colonel connected to the masonic lodge who commissioned the opera. In 1923 the house is a psychiatric hospital visited by J.W.N. Sullivan, who in real life was an expert on Beethoven and physics. Sullivan investigates a woman able to recall past lives, and learns about the opera.

In Beethoven: His Spiritual Development, Sullivan argued that art is a kind of knowledge, different from scientific knowledge and complementary to it. Beethoven's Assassins develops this theme. The plot involves meserism, clairvoyance and psychic healing, mentioning Beethoven's connections with practitioners such as Johann Malfatti and Ludwig Schnorr.

Reception

Ruth McKee wrote in The Irish Times: "a deliciously intellectual, ambitious book that explores time, metaphysics, narrative and pretty much everything, all at once."

The Financial Times described Beethoven's Assassins as "an ambitious, entertaining novel full of comic brio", concluding, "Beethoven’s Assassins is impeccably ambitious, reliably entertaining and a little over the top."

The Scotsman called it "a brilliantly well-informed 200-year history of philosophy, science, music and mysticism, touched with an edge of Da Vinci Code hocus pocus," and remarked on "the sheer fun and narrative energy of Crumey’s writing, the skill and insight with which he conjures up each of his narrators from the repellent to the poignant, and the huge ingenuity with which he interweaves their stories."

The Herald (Glasgow) commented, "Beethoven's Assassins may be a gloriously multi-faceted puzzle-box of a novel, but even those anticipating a dense, abstruse intellectual exercise of interest only to literary theorists will find themselves drawn in by its well-drawn characters and emotional weight... Beethoven's Assassins is that refreshing thing, a novel of ideas with all the intrigue and momentum (and occasional red herring) of an absorbing mystery, underscored by a dark, ironic sense of humour."

Paul Griffiths wrote in Literary Review, "Crumey gives each of his chapters its own period and central character, and flips from one to another with the dexterity and humour of a champion juggler. Matters of art, science and philosophy are deftly discussed and sometimes linked to each other within the narrative."

The Spectator judged Beethoven's Assassins "great cerebral fun, with its quantum physics, telepathy, time travel and fraying of fact and fiction. But all this is its own misdirection... The writing here about the soul-grinding nature of the bureaucracy surrounding illness and death is chillingly good. The questions the novel poses about science and aesthetics (is Einstein as good as Beethoven?) pale in comparison to the rawness of the loss it depicts with the same scrutiny as an equation or a late quartet."

The Historical Novel Society said, "This is a book to appeal to readers who enjoy time-travel, mystery, illusion – and no clear-cut answers."

The Crack said, "Beethoven's Assassins is a huge knickerbocker glory of a novel that weaves together history, art, science, music, and more. Philosophical, but funny with it."

Connections with other books by Crumey

Beethoven's Assassins features the Coyle family (Joe, Ann and their son Robert) from the fictional town of Kenzie. The same names appeared in Sputnik Caledonia, but with different storylines. The writer Heinrich Behring figures in Beethoven's Assassins as a disciple of George Gurdjieff, having previously appeared in Mobius Dick and The Great Chain of Unbeing. Beethoven's Assassins also mentions the encyclopedia of Jean-Bernard Rosier, first mentioned in D'Alembert's Principle and Mr Mee. The discussions of music in Beethoven's Assassins echo similar thoughts in Music, in a Foreign Language and The Secret Knowledge. Timothy C. Baker has said of Crumey's novels that they "do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct." Crumey has stated, "There is no consistent whole – the 'story of everything' is self-contradictory."

D'Alembert's Principle (novel)

D'Alembert's Principle (Dedalus Books, 1996) is a novel by Andrew Crumey, and the second in a sequence of three set wholly or partly in the eighteenth century (the others being Pfitz and Mr Mee). It is in three sections, subtitled "Memory, Reason and Imagination". The U.S. edition was subtitled "A novel in three panels". It has been translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Italian, Turkish and Romanian. It prompted El Mundo (Spain) to say "Crumey is one of the most interesting and original European authors of recent years."

The first section, recursively titled "D'Alembert's Principle", is a historical fiction depicting Jean le Rond D'Alembert, featuring his unrequited love for Julie de l'Espinasse, and describing the principle of physics named after him. The second section, "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson" is a speculative fiction about interplanetary travel by an eighteenth-century Scotsman. The third section, "Tales from Rreinnstadt", is a Menippean satire featuring the setting and title character from Pfitz.

Themes

Stefania Cassar has contextualised D'Alembert's Principle as one of a number of British novels from the 1980s and 90s that portrayed science and scientists in the light of ongoing cultural debates. "D'Alembert's Principle, Mendel's Dwarf and Three Times Table... illustrate how some of our most basic ideas about 'science', 'nature' and 'literature' are historically constituted, and explore how these underlying cultural assumptions can inform and/or influence even the most apparently 'objective' and 'factual' scientific inquiries. Xorandor, ThreeTimesTable, and D'Alembert's Principle are set in societies where powerful elements and/or influential figures attempt to reinforce and police the boundaries between science and the humanities, between reason and the imagination. All three novels insist that such attempts to carve out definite boundaries are misguided, limiting and ultimately doomed to failure... criticism of science from the perspective of the humanities can expose the limitations of the assumptions that under lie the two-cultures model and bring to light fresh ways of perceiving the literature-science relation."

An unnamed character at the end of the first section of D'Alembert's Principle proposes a probabilistic theory of physics different from D'Alembert's deterministic one. This character reappears in Mr Mee as Jean-Bernard Rosier. The Rosier Corporation is important in Mobius Dick, and the Rosier Foundation is mentioned in The Great Chain of Unbeing. Like the three parts of D'Alembert's Principle, the novels themselves are loosely connected and readable in any order. T. C. Baker calls this structure "monadological", observing that "five of [Crumey's] seven novels explore, in various ways, the legacies of Enlightenment thought, often drawing upon the same ideas and figures. These novels, crucially, do not amount to a sequence, nor is the relation between events in them ever straightforwardly causal. Instead, each novel covers similar ground in a series of overlapping folds, while remaining narratively distinct."

Reception

Merle Rubin wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "Writing in the inventive, playful tradition of Calvino and Borges, Mr. Crumey blends history, fantasy, fable and metaphysical speculation in a confection that is at once elegant, provocative and thoroughly entertaining."

Lucy Atkins in The Guardian called it "The literary equivalent of an Escher" with "no identifiable end or beginning."

Kirkus Reviews said, "Once the reader's head stops spinning from trying to follow the intricate mechanics of the tale here, there is much to be enjoyed and admired. Still, Crumey's effort doesn't measure up to its less fragmentary predecessors."

Erica Wagner wrote in The Times: "The three sections are loosely linked; they seem to orbit each other like bodies in space, their paths never crossing but never separate, either. Crumey's writing has a fastidiousness and dry humour apposite to his 18th-century setting, and a dreamlike structure reminiscent of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. This clever, deceptive novel sets out to prove that rationalism is an emperor without any clothes and succeeds by doing what all fine writing should: reawakening in the reader a sense of the deep mysteriousness of life."

Ray Olson wrote in Booklist, "Proceeding from poignancy to awe to hilarity, the three parts constitute an intellectual treat that admirers of Borges and philosophical sf master Stanislaw Lem, in particular, should appreciate."

Carolyn See wrote in The Washington Post, "This is a postmodern novel. More specifically, it's made up of a novella, a doodad in the form of an account of interplanetary travel, and a third narrative that, if it weren't already labeled as postmodern, could best be described as a shaggy dog story."

Sybil Steinberg wrote in Publishers Weekly, "The loopy dialogue between Pfitz and Goldman is reminiscent of the Tortoise and Achilles sections in Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Crumey is described as a postmodernist, but he isn't anything so terrifying: he's simply reviving that old Enlightenment pastime, the philosophical jeu d'esprit."

Tobias Jones wrote in The Observer: "Deliberate confusion and incoherence are the ingredients of Crumey's third novel. D'Alembert believes he has found a 'mathematical formula by which all the contradictory affairs of men' are 'reduced to a single principle'. It is a historical triptych, travelling between different characters, narratives, and even planets; but as it moves from Memory to Reason and then Imagination, the theory breaks down into chaos."

Tom Deveson wrote in The Sunday Times, "This is a highly polished fable, which sustains its learning with wit and zestful confidence."

Alice Thompson wrote in The Scotsman: "This makes for a disjointed but challenging read, for Crumey is experimenting with various forms of fiction: the fiction of history and science, of philosophy and of the imagination. D'Alembert's fictional memoirs are an expertly structured, moving account... "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson", in contrast, is a kind of Swiftean satire of various branches of philosophical thought... In his final section, Crumey uses the sensuality of the empirical world. His language becomes more richly descriptive... Like Crumey's giant astronomical clock, marking time of the universe, his ambitious novel works. It doesn't stop ticking."

Boyd Tonkin wrote in New Statesman, "Growing lighter as it builds, the whole book adds up to a scorching critique of pure Reason. A shame, then, that Crumey gets lost sometimes in the dry abstractions of Enlightened prose."

Susan Salter Reynolds wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "a principle, a vision and a story combine to create a portrait of the 18th-century European mind stretched thin between the heart and the stars."

Ann Irvin wrote in Library Journal, "D'Alembert's Principle is actually three stories, including the title story, "The Cosmography of Magnus Ferguson," and "Tales from Rreinstadt." Each represents an aspect of D'Alembert's definition of knowledge: memory, reason, and imagination. The stories are set in the 18th century, when D'Alembert worked with Diderot on his famous dictionary. The first story uses D'Alembert's memories to illustrate his great success with mathematical theories but his failure in love. The second story, representing reason, is an exploration of empiricism. "Tales from Rreinstadt" is narrated by Pfitz, the beggar who also appeared in Crumey's earlier novel, Pfitz, while Pfitz is temporarily imprisoned by a wealthy jeweler. Crumey, a Scotsman, has cleverly interwoven aspects of human thought with entertaining stories. The details and tone of the stories aptly convey the tenor of 18th-century rationalism. For academic and public libraries where intellectual fiction is enjoyed."