One of my favorite literary truisms is this: you can render words as music, but you can't render music as words. It has a corollary: if you doubt the veracity of the latter clause, by all means give it a try -- the effort confirms the impossibility.
I've tried it, numerous times (e.g. a novel called Blue Oboe). This book tries it and serves as further testimony to the impossibility of rendering music as words. As such, then, it is a failure -- as it has to be. But it fails delightfully, suggestively, and informatively. Its failure is the failure of everyone to live forever. Yet live we do.
The Big Music is the English translation of the Gaelic term (ceòl mòr) for the "classical" solo music of the Great Highland Bagpipe. It is absolutely and completely a thing apart in Western music: although it can loosely be described as a theme with variations, it lacks the propulsion of a "beat." Yes, some variations do come close to allowing you to tap your foot to them, but even those defer to the piper's internal sense of how that rhythm can be manipulated to keep with the theme of the overall piece -- a lament, a salutation, a challenge to fight. In other words, it apotheosizes the musical principle of rubato applied to the telephone game: play it the way your teacher's teacher's teacher's teacher -- and so on back to the far misty mountains -- felt it.
This novel attempts to render in words this kind of music. It takes the organizing principle of this music -- the statement of a theme and its embellishment -- as its own. The reader sees this at the very outset: the table of contents shows it explicitly.
The result is easily summarized. The fact that it includes spoilers is of no consequence, any more than looking at a written piece of music spoils its actual performance.
The theme is the flight of a dying (demented?) old man up a Highland hillside, with his baby grand-daughter in his arms, in a deranged effort to reach a remote hideaway where he can conclude the composition of a piece of Big Music, a "lament to himself." It is obvious that the baby's life is in the balance, but she is rescued and returned to her mother and grandmother by the prompt actions of the baby's step-grandfather. Subsequent variations broaden the scope of the story. First, the family background is pushed out and back to previous generations, so that -- to give just one example -- the demented old man's fraught relationship with his own father is brought into play (the father is the son's bagpipe teacher, but his pedagogical methods include the infliction of corporal punishment; the son leaves "never to return," but return he does -- after making a success of himself in London -- but only at the funeral of the father, in a kind of inverse (perverse?) retelling of the parable of the prodigal. Next is the elaboration of piping culture itself: the father operates a piping school in the remote Highland house where the entire story takes place; it achieves some prominence in the promotion of Big Music. Finally there's the story of the Highlands, particularly how the family at the center of the story manages to hold on through the Clearances.
Of course this easy summary leaves out a whole, whole, whole lot. Which is one reason why, if any of this piques your interest -- particularly if Scotland or bagpiping interest you (a significant portion of the book is given over to the minutiae of piping) -- you should read the book.
I myself was drawn by the thought of the challenge of rendering "Big Music" as a novel. My own conclusion is that, with its broadening-out narrative, it would better be entitled "Nested Parentheses." Further, in the telling, the successive embellishments overwhelm rather than highlight the theme, which sometimes in the telling can barely be heard. Those embellishments themselves contain too much interest and variety to simulate Big Music, which is hypnotic in its repetitiveness.
The book, then, is both a noble effort and a complete failure, but in the sense that Roland in the Pass of Roncesvalles succeeded even as he failed. Failure is irrelevant when the effort is redeemed by a legacy.
And the legacy of this book is -- should be -- a deeper understanding of many things: bagpiping and its culture, the history of Scotland and the Highlands, and even such very broad subjects as social structure, with its standardized family, gender, and class roles. Having read some commentary on the book (including an article in the Scottish Literary Review), I would advocate something that so far no one has mentioned: that the book should be read as a symbolic fable of Scottish independence: deep roots are established (by way of piping culture), but economic and social forces spin succeeding generations far away -- even as far as New Zealand, where author Gunn is from. Nonetheless, the pull of identity is so strong that even those -- like the baby-snatchng protagonist -- sucked into the British sphere (as represented by London) return to their highland home to try to figure out a way forward that is manifestly Scottish. After all, doesn't the big music always, always return to the original theme? Some say that this means the "tune" is cyclical and thus never-ending. I say rather that the tune returns to itself and ends where it began, only all the wiser for its experience.
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