The Courage Consort
Michel Faber Canongate Books, 121pp, £6.99
ISBN 1841952265
Rites of passage don't come much subtler than this. Or, oddly, given the subject matter, much funnier. As the book opens, a middle-aged, depressed Kate Consort is contemplating suicide by jumping from a fourth-floor window. At the end, she is unrecognisable because of how much crying she has done at the sudden death of a member of the Courage Consort, "the seventh most renowned serious vocal ensemble in the world". Yet, even though her journey might appear minimal, you are left in no doubt, by this assured and clever book, that her life has changed track for ever.
Traumatised as a child by the suicide of her mother, Kate is taken up at a young age by pompous Roger Courage. She becomes his wife; they sing in his ensemble. Now 47, she hasn't "signed a cheque or set foot in a bank for years". Everyone had negotiated "their passage into adulthood except her. She was still waiting to be called."
While the Courage Consort is staying at the Luitspelerhuisje chateau in Belgium, practising Pino Fugazza's Partitum Mutante for the Benelux Contemporary Music Festival, Kate is awakened in the night by cries from the surrounding forest, cries that no one else can hear. Kate, it emerges, has unearthed a local legend of how a baby that disappeared into the forest with its frightened mother at the end of the Second World War can still be heard crying.
During her stay at the chateau, Kate's triumphs mount: she rides a bike, a man looks at her breasts, she goes for a walk alone in the forest, "slightly awed at her own daring waywardness". There, she comes to the realisation, "in the clear light of day", that there are no ghosts, that the dead stay dead and the living "have to push on".
The title Partitum Mutante, Roger explains to a journalist, is a "play on partita . . . as well as some reference to partum . . . Mutante then suggests mutant birth, or a mutant musical form." (So passive and unquestioning is Kate that she had actually gone to Belgium to sing a piece of music she had thought was about underpants, as she confuses mutante with mutande.) Up on stage, there will be a film by a celebrated young Dutch film-maker of a larynx turning into a vulva; the vagina then dilates to show the slick grey head of a baby being born. Because of the death of the Consort's bass singer, they never get to perform. The very satisfying (and long-delayed) partitum mutante turns out to be Kate's own.
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