What leads Jonathan Coe, a renowned British state-of-the-nation comic novelist, to write a work of historical fiction narrated by a Greek-Spanish music critic who befriends a French composer and his English pupil?
Coe achieved fame with 1994’s What a Carve Up!, his comic-gothic takedown of Thatcherism, and a trilogy of British political satires starting with 2001’s The Rotters’ Club. But his full body of work, now numbering some 16 novels to date, displays a greater eclecticism of genre and subject matter. This new work more closely recalls Expo 58, Coe’s 2013 comedy set in 1950s Brussels and riffing on the tropes and clichés of the “Englishman abroad”, and Mr Wilder and Me, his 2020 novel based on real historical characters and exploring themes of creativity, age and friendship.
Lessons in Harmony charts the real-life friendship between Ralph Vaughan Williams and Maurice Ravel. In 1907, the 35-year-old Vaughan Williams went to Paris to study under the 32-year-old Ravel. Thereafter, Vaughan Williams, in his own words, threw off “the heavy contrapuntal Teutonic manner” on his way to becoming a national treasure. Ravel inspired him without unduly influencing him, and famously said that Vaughan Williams was his only pupil “who does not write my music”. Beyond those facts, their relationship is only sketchily documented, which gives Coe the freedom to flesh out the story in his own witty and suggestive ways.
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