A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Puccini’s Ghosts
Morag Joss
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
Yep, that was exactly as bad as I remembered. The last time I reread a disappointing college book I said I was going to slap myself if I did it again, but in this case I went in knowing perfectly well that I was going to hate it because sometimes you’re not too old for a hate read, so I’m granting myself an exception. But also I was weirdly craving this reread and if I’m perfectly honest this book has been on my shelf for the last fifteen years (the receipt was tucked into the book, apparently I paid $13 for it and I guess I just never read it after I bought it) and it has stuck with me through every unhaul and every move and I am never getting rid of it and I have no idea why. This is nonsense and I won’t pretend otherwise, though it does fit with the general nonsensical vibe of the book. As to why it took me fifteen years to finally read the copy I bought: I originally borrowed the book from the library near my school, and a couple years after college I guess I was in Barnes & Noble and I decided I just had to have a copy, only I knew enough to know I despised the characters so I never actually reread it.
Technically the story opens in 2004, but actually the drama begins in 1944, when twenty-year-old fledgling soprano Florence “Fleur” Pettifer – singing in the chorus with an English company and understudying the role of Turandot – unwittingly torches her own career after buying black market stockings from handsome law student Raymond Duncan. Under ordinary circumstances this would’ve been fine and her purchase would’ve gone unremarked, only she sneaked off with him during the show and thus was not present when the regular Turandot broke her toes backstage. Fleur is promptly fired and abandoned in Glasgow as the company makes its way to its next venue, leaving her with no one but Raymond, who takes her out for a drink and later sneaks her into his lodgings for the night. The all-but-inevitable drunken hook-up ends in pregnancy, because when it rains it pours. Raymond immediately offers to marry her, though they spend the rest of their lives lying about the actual date of the wedding to explain the timing of the baby. Unfortunately, this isn’t the end of their troubles: Raymond is arrested for black market dealings after the war, disqualifying him from practicing law, and he only manages to get a job as a legal clerk through a connection in his hometown, a charmless Scottish village called Burnhead. In the end he and Fleur manage to somewhat settle into Burnhead, where they move into a mostly unbuilt neighborhood called Seaview Villas. You would think Fleur would be at least slightly grateful, but she isn’t, and she spends the next fifteen years making Raymond’s life hell while telling the whole world that she was kidnapped and carried off to Scotland against her will by a madman.
Thus we arrive in 2004, when Eliza “Lila” Du Cann arrives in Burnhead following the quiet death of her father. Now almost sixty, Lila escaped Burnhead several decades ago to pursue a career in opera and never came back, though she kept in infrequent and impersonal contact with Raymond out of little more than a sense of obligation. Her ineffectual efforts to sort out Raymond’s house and arrange his funeral are shepherded by her neighbor, Christine, who sees that Lila is struggling and helps her keep the arrangements more or less on track despite the giant mountain of debris that starts to accumulate in Lila’s yard. This is damned nice of her, but Lila is her mother’s daughter and she is no more grateful to Christine than Fleur was to Raymond because this family is horrible; in fact, Christine is initially presented as an irritant. Still, she gets used to Christine’s existence and even becomes moderately interested in Christine’s young daughter, though her erratic behavior and odd hours quickly become alarming to everyone who tries to help her. In between stalking old friends and trying to get herself written into the local paper as a debatably interesting story, Lila is engulfed in painful memories of the summer her family fell apart and quickly falls into a sort of mental haze that includes vivid hallucinations, starting with her – as it later turns out – last-ever day of school in 1960.
In 1960, Lila is an awkward fifteen-year-old, possessed of her mother’s diva temperament but slightly leavened with a hefty dose of Scottish practicality, or pessimism. This means she is prone to dramatic pronouncements and has inherited her mother’s contempt for both the town and her father, but she is also scornful of her mother and views herself as far more down-to-earth, even though she isn’t. She isn’t English enough for her mother but she also doesn’t exactly fit in with the locals, whose accent she never adopts because Fleur would never have allowed it. She inherited something of her mother’s talent but conceals it out of embarrassment since the neighbors all think (quite rightly) that Fleur thinks of herself as the next Maria Callas, and her only friend is her classmate Enid Foley, who is quite stupid and unabashedly proud of that fact. Enid and Lila are always at each other’s throats, and the only real reason Lila preserves the friendship is Enid’s mother, an amiable woman who runs the local Sew Right. Of course, it being Lila, she can’t stop sneering at Mrs. Foley up her sleeve even as she longs to adopt her as her own mother. Meanwhile, Fleur is a spoiled and entitled housewife who thinks nothing of forging Raymond’s signature on a downpayment for a staggeringly expensive Decca stereogram, on which she mostly plays Maria Callas’s Turandot recording as she mourns her own strangled career. When she’s not sitting by the stereogram, she goes on costly shopping trips, throws tantrums when she doesn’t get her way, and makes up stupid rules just to feel like she’s in command of the household, while the downtrodden Raymond has been having a quiet affair with Audrey Mathieson, the secretary at his legal practice.
At the time that we meet her, Fleur’s greatest fixation is the unused garage attached to the house, which she believes is ridiculous when they have no car: Raymond cycles to work; Lila walks to school; Fleur mostly stays home. She deludes herself into thinking that a £500 Premium Bond will allow her to finally buy a car, but Raymond’s very reasonable counterarguments send her into such a fury that she throws a tantrum of a magnitude Lila has never seen. After a failed attempt to paint the word “BASTARD” on the garage doors (she ran out of paint after the first four letters), Fleur marks her grand finale by trying to burn the garage to the ground, but this too fizzles when Lila puts out the fire. While Lila tells a nosy Enid that “BAST” is merely Fleur’s way of promoting the newly invented Burnhead Association for Singing Turandot, Raymond calls Fleur’s younger brother George, himself a professional conductor and music teacher, for support. George agrees to stay until Fleur has recovered from her latest fit of “histrionics,” and, after a conversation with Lila, gets it into his head to give Fleur some sort of career-related closure by staging an amateur production of Turandot in Burnhead under an unofficial company he names BAST. In this conceit, Fleur is naturally cast as Turandot; Lila is cast as Liù, owing to George’s timely discovery of her singing ability; and the role of Calaf goes to Giuseppe “Joe” Foscari, George’s twenty-year-old boyfriend/music student. The rest of the cast is filled out by locals, who are wary but – thanks to the help of John Mathieson, Audrey’s cuckolded but deeply practical husband – embrace the project with an enthusiasm that surprises even George. Before anyone realizes what has happened, the whole town has made the opera their entire personality, especially Lila, who begins to identify intensely as Liù.
With his cast and crew seemingly in place, George sets out to abridge the opera for the sake of simplicity, making a number of eyebrow-raising changes that include rolling Ping, Pang, and Pong into one character named Pung, as well as taking significant – and unauthorized – liberties with the score. Even with George’s cuts, the production remains a massive undertaking, and it is not helped by Fleur’s behavior or Joe’s spiteful indifference. Though George advertised him as one of the greatest tenors of his generation, Joe turns out to possess a middling talent that prevents him from properly performing “Nessun Dorma”; he also has a drinking problem and a wandering eye and has been losing interest in singing, though every time he falters George gaslights him into continuing with his music studies. None of this is even slightly apparent to Lila, who becomes insanely obsessed with him the minute she lays eyes on him, and for some reason assumes that he feels the same way about her. (Joe, for his part, finds her creepy and annoying. Which is fair.) On the opposite end of the talent spectrum, Fleur – now dangerously reliant on the production but somehow still incapable of taking it seriously – hinders George’s timeline by adopting a superstar attitude to which she is not actually entitled. In practical terms this means she refuses to practice when she doesn’t feel like it, grants herself extended breaks at the drop of a hat, and fights with George over the proper interpretation of her character.
Yet in the end, the limping production finally gets tanked by homophobia and teenage jealousy when Lila accidentally witnesses George and Joe having sex just before the first performance. Seething and heartbroken, she goes onstage as planned but then denounces both George and Joe, loudly revealing their tryst to the entire audience. The production dies in chaos; Joe disappears and is never seen again, while George and Fleur escape to London. George is shortly sent to prison, where he dies a year later; Fleur manages to get a job, but commits suicide when her company demotes her a week before her fortieth birthday. Back in Burnhead, Lila succumbs to glandular fever right after outing George and Joe, but later escapes town for good with Mrs. Foley’s help. Over the years she studies music and manages to make her way into professional opera, changing her name to “Du Cann” to make herself sound classier than she actually is, though in the real world she turns out to be a small-time talent and never gets further than the chorus. However, she still has an unwarranted sense of her own importance, and therefore tells everyone who will listen that she has an “international” career. In the present day, with her international career beckoning like a mirage, the adult Lila gets through her father’s funeral mostly without incident, and, with all of her obligations now met, sets fire to the pile of goods on the lawn, presumably burning her last few bridges for good.
As I say, I came into this fully knowing I was going to hate it; but I also knew I was going to like the writing, because Joss really does write beautifully. Back in my snooty Margaret Atwood phase I didn’t care for the teenaged Lila’s third-person narration, but in the present I love it all. The prose is gorgeous and slightly reminiscent of Cat’s Eye, woven with a snarky wit that just barely keeps the stupid snotty characters from becoming insufferable to the point of unreadability, which I appreciate. At the same time, though, it’s not really enough because the characters are that bad and there’s no getting around that. Fleur is particularly infuriating as she minces and pouts her way through this production that quite literally came to life for her sake, and I feel bad about dumping on someone who is so clearly suffering from at least five different mental illnesses but I can’t help it. Raymond is a far better person than I am, because I would have dumped her ass and disappeared the minute she got fired. I was particularly offended by the story of the stereogram, not so much for the audacity as for Fleur’s unshakable belief that she is entitled to nice things, no matter the cost, and anyone who says otherwise is an asshole. She is childish, temperamental, almost willfully and maliciously stupid, and the real miracle is that I didn’t try to punch her through the pages of the book.
But the real problem with the book is Lila, who has no redeeming qualities (pretty normal for this cast of characters) and doesn’t even seem entirely human. This is partly because she is so thoroughly in love with herself, though her ego is cut with self-loathing and some very slight self-awareness, at least in regard to her actual level of talent. This is a woman who will take her father’s obituary and try to spin it into a feature article about her own career and her triumphant return to Burnhead. I had to read that conversation three times and I still don’t see the connection when she literally was directed to the features department to ask about an obituary for Raymond. As a child she idolizes her Uncle George, who represents the glamor of a life outside of Burnhead, but somehow convinces herself that she has to be heartless in order to impress him. Her heartlessness in fact has the opposite effect, though she never recognizes this and fully believes he will spirit her away to London to live with him while she attends music college. The other problem is the obsession with Joe, who gives her absolutely no reason to believe in a romantic future but somehow still becomes the center of her every delusion. (Not that she’s beyond salvation: the sight of him “cheating” on her turns out to be a real buzzkill.) She builds an entire life for them out of nothing, begins to compile a list of expected “first”s from their very first encounter: the first gift he gives her, the first time he kisses her, the first time he tells her he loves her, etc. On the day they meet, she expects him to be completely devoted to her even though he doesn’t know her from Eve, and harasses him for attention – “begs” is too kind a word – when he turns out to be human and tired.
This goes beyond what I would consider a normal teenage infatuation and pushes into actual insanity. I’d be okay with the imaginary life-planning if it weren’t accompanied by a stubborn insistence, both spoken and unspoken, that the pair of them should mean everything to each other. Her obsession leads her to deliberately twist and misinterpret every word he speaks and every gesture he makes, while the actual kindnesses she receives from her father are attributed to Joe, who is indifferent to her presence at best. Even at the end of their so-called relationship, when he drunkenly molests her, his interest is not genuine, and their almost-tryst ends prematurely. (Lila, of course, takes the encounter as indelible proof that they are Meant To Be, though she’ll be disabused of this notion quickly enough.) Just prior to this aborted hook-up, she stalks him through a train station, making such a scene that he almost has no choice but to pay attention to her, and guilts him into returning to the production from which he is attempting to flee. The whole sequence is so insane and so cringe that it got me to side with Joe, and that’s not good. If your underage character is so bad that I’m siding against them with their literal molestor, something has gone terribly wrong. The only time I am ever on Lila’s side is when she is dealing with Enid, and that’s only because Enid as a character is somehow so much worse. Yet at the same time, it’s damned lucky that Lila didn’t find out until adulthood that Enid was born out of wedlock, because teenage Lila would never have let that go.
Overall, this book didn’t do any favors to women or professional musicians, and it definitely didn’t do anything for the LGBTQ+ community, and I can’t even say if this was Joss’s intention. I genuinely have no idea where Joss herself stands on any of these things when the women are such over-the-top unlikable divas and the “real” musicians, to say nothing of the gay characters, are almost satirical stereotypes. George is unapologetically presented as a child molestor, verbally and emotionally abusive to anyone unlucky enough to work with him, and I am not amused. When he dies, it is because institutional homophobia prevents him from receiving life-saving medical care, which would seem like a critique if he hadn’t already been cast as a serial groomer. In his relationship with Joe, he is passive aggressive and manipulative, constantly lifting Joe up while simultaneously slamming him down, and it’s never clear if he himself is aware of this fact when he always seems to think he is in the right. I can’t say I ever liked Joe, but I am glad he got away from the combined life-sucking forces of George and Lila. I wouldn’t wish those two on anyone but my worst enemies.
As to why the book got two stars instead of one: the reason is the same as the reason it has stayed on my shelf for the last fifteen years, and that reason is that the heart of the story – the story of the failed opera – is endlessly entertaining, and it sucked me right in. I loved reading about Burnhead, loved the dialogue between the Scottish characters, the sardonic humor, the grief George gets from his cast and crew as they nitpick his abridgements and ask why they can’t sing it in English, the lumpy practicality of the people, even the near isolation of the town. I realize that town is not suited to people like Fleur and Lila, but I personally wouldn’t mind living in such a place. I like the idea of having a beach in my backyard (okay, not the prettiest beach, but it’ll do) and being able to walk to every shop I need, though the bus route sounds frankly infuriating. I have to admit that I don’t think much of Turandot, an opera with some beautiful music and an awful story, and in my opinion the book doesn’t critique it as much as it might. But the story of the summer of BAST is gripping and addicting and sometimes just so, so funny, and I can no more part with this book than I could rehome my cat. It is a part of my shelf and my home, a part of my college nostalgia even, and I have no intention of giving it up. (Also this book is the reason I renewed my Spotify membership, because I needed access to the Turandot recording I used to play as a morning alarm in college. I’m sure my roommates loved me.)
My ultimate conclusions: hate Fleur; hate Lila; hate George; hate Joe; HATE Enid; feel sorry for Raymond. If Joss was trying to portray professional musicians as abusive narcissists, she couldn’t have done a better job. I suppose the expectation is that we as the reader will shrug this off: divas will be divas, after all. Yet even if I accepted this, the book is still a cringey, murderous-rage-inducing ride, packed with the kinds of characters you would absolutely never want to meet in real life, and all in all I won’t be revisiting it again anytime soon.
