Book Review: Orfeo (2014). Richard Powers.

This is the most difficult and complex Richard Powers novel I've read so far.   It tells the story of Peter Els, a now 70-year-old loner and musical composer (of classical music) who has spent his adult life trying to create a piece of music of surpassing and universal truth. 

 

Through scenes looking back to different stages of Peter's adult life, we see a number of separate threads of his personal story, including his first great love in college, a failed marriage to another woman, an often-destructive collaboration and friendship with a strange dancer and dramatist, and his troubled experience as a mostly absent parent to a daughter. 

 

Along the way, we also are exposed to deep discussions of music and music theory, the history of 20th century classical music and various trends in academic criticism of it, and an interwoven set of political themes about repressive technologies, authoritarianism and the social damage of the war on terror.  

 

Looming dangerously in the background of this complicated stew of ideas and events is yet another plot-line about the accidental discovery of his amateur experiments with home-brew DNA manipulation (in his quest for a new musical form), and his eventual pursuit by a bioterrorism-obsessed police force and a hysterical internet-fueled post-9/11 public.  It definitely held my attention, but at times it seemed like there was just too much going on to follow it all.  

 

At the end, the main question I had from reading this book, which was deeply relevant to me, was: what is the point of composing and creating new music, when there is already so much of it freely available to anyone, and where for most musicians, there is so little chance that many people will ever hear or appreciate the product of all their hard work and creative obsessions?  For that matter, why is anyone driven to make art if there’s no likely probability of recognition or reward for it?

 

It’s an enduring mystery of the musical mind and the creative soul, and of our own times, as explored by one of our greatest contemporary novelists.  Recommended.