The Music Room William Fiennes Picador, 224pp, £14.99­

Broughton in Oxfordshire is a 14th-century moated manor house that has been described as “about the most beautiful castle in all England”. But, for William Fiennes, whose parents inherited it shortly before he was born, it was simply “the house”. “I didn’t question the world as I found it,” he writes; “ . . . our wide moat and gatehouse tower . . . were just facts I grew up among, how things were.”

In Fiennes’s first book, the 2002 memoir and travelogue The Snow Geese, he left England to follow the 2,000-mile annual migration of six million lesser snow geese from the Gulf Coast of America to their Arctic breeding grounds. The geese’s journey was mirrored by his own escape from the enforced confinement of a serious illness and convalescence in his family home. The Music Room returns to what he left behind: a childhood shaped by gentle, conscientious parents, and by his brother Richard, then aged 11, who suffers from severe epilepsy and difficulties caused both by the resulting brain damage and his cocktail of anticonvulsant medications. (His other siblings are shadowy presences, at first away at boarding school and university, then in London.) The memoir has three strands: his castle childhood; the progress of his brother’s epilepsy and treatment; and a history of the ­attempts by science to decode the condition – from the ancient Greek horror of “the sacred disease” through crude experiments with electric eels, to modern medicine’s best guesses at the effects of electricity in the brain.

The Music Room evokes Broughton and its magical surroundings – the walled garden and moat, the fields and woods, the churchyard – through long, meandering sentences that turn over the fragments of a boyhood spent living on domestic terms with history:

When the moat was low you’d get a band of rough, muddy beach strewn with white stones, potsherds, algae piles and sheep bones, a wrack-stench of vegetation rotting down, and I’d work my way along like a beachcomber, picking up pieces of china and medieval iron implements, the neck of an old clay bottle with relief decoration around it, bases of stoneware jugs, hieroglyph prints of herons’ feet in the mud.

Life at Broughton is calm, orderly and cyclical – except when Richard returns home from one of his many residential care centres. He alternates between enthusiasm, stupor and unpredictable rages, threatening his family with an iron bar and burning his mother’s face with a hot frying pan. His explosions of energy echo through the castle, and his story provides The Music Room with its drive, puncturing placid descriptive passages with outbursts of charm or menace: “Some people round here are asking for trouble.”

The Music Room doesn’t mention the castle’s name, or Fiennes’s parents’ grand titles, Lord and Lady Saye and Sele. There are occasional reminders that it is an exceptional place – theatre companies perform Shakespeare in the gardens, TV actors rehearse sword fights for The Scarlet Pimpernel and Joseph Andrews, Morecambe and Wise arrive to film their Christmas show. But Fiennes’s observations shrink the building and its history down to a domestic scale. His mother waters the rush matting in the King’s Chamber “like a lawn, swinging the can from side to side” (the Broughton website has a 1974 Sunday Mirror clipping headlined “Lady Char”, showing her hard at work with dustpan and brush).

Like Richard, the house needs constant care: it occupies the family in a relentless round of maintenance and repair. It becomes almost a family member: after a bruising encounter with Richard, Fiennes’s father leans his hand on a wall to ask the building for “some of its strength”. When a teenage Fiennes moodily climbs out on to the castle roof and accidentally cracks a 400-year-old tile, he is overcome with guilt and pity “because of some idea I had that the house was a sentient being, vulnerable to injury”.

The Music Room is beautifully written, detailed without being overblown, precise without being precious. Fiennes has a talent for surprising similes – jackdaws perch on a roof “clacking like snooker balls”, lily pads sit on the moat’s surface “like jam papers”. The memoir ends with an expected tragedy that punctures his boyhood conviction that he can control the passing of time by altering the speed of his viola-playing mother’s metronome. Devotedly piling up memories of his boyhood home, The Music Room conjures back to life a much-loved, and lost, past.

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