The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker: review

By Jake Kerridge 1056AM GMT 09 March 2010

The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker

The story of the Heavens Gate group, 39 of whose members killed themselves in California in 1997 in the idea that this would concede their souls to house an visitor spaceship, is endorsed celebration of the mass for anybody who thinks that the grounds of Patricia Dunckers new novel is as well outlandish. It concerns an conflict of suicides between the Swiss members of a cult who ceremony an planetary physique in the constellation Auriga they call the Dark Host and hold to be a outrider of the Apocalypse.

But there is a turn in Dunckers tale. The cult members are not the common saddos but Switzerlands systematic and inventive elite, together with the arch global- warming confidant and best-known radio astronomer; to conclude the outcome this has, we have to suppose Nicholas Stern, Patrick Moore and the total of the Royal Society jumping off the roof tiles of the Greenwich Observatory.

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The novel starts with the find in a timberland in the Jura of the corpses of sixteen people, organised in a semicircle. Andr Schweigen, a testy French cop, records similarities to a mass self-murder in Switzerland a small years progressing and court sequence his co-worker and lover, Dominique Carpentier, a decider well well known as "la chasseuse de sectes", the cult hunter. She is a receptive thinker who marks down the ageing smoothies who set up fraudulent sects in sequence to lay waste the gullible.

Dominique and Andr find a smashed book containing planetary maps and prayers created in an illegible denunciation and find that they are traffic with a cult of really old start well well known as the Faith.

They lane down the guru, a important Swiss composer called Friedrich Grosz, who fundamentally turns out to be an ageing smoothie and takes to promulgation Dominique flowers. The incident develops in a proceed that lends the novels pretension an play on words Dominique is the Composers Judge in the clarity that she is perplexing to consider his blame over the suicides, but she additionally starts to tumble in love with him.

Ambiguity additionally characterises Dunckers proceed to Dominique. Her fervour for her work is excellent but has led to an emptied personal life. We are told that "she disliked song for the elementary reason that it muddied her emotions"; examination the Composer perform and saying "the zealous attention" of the rest of the assembly is "like being piece of a assemblage whose ideology she did not share". She refuses to admit a colleagues evidence that a small people who stick on sects find a clarity of village well value handing over their hold up assets for. If not utterly as distrustful of note values as, say, the Prince of Wales, Duncker is maybe implying that those who live by them could do so a small some-more imaginatively.

One does wonder, though, because Dominique, with all her dread of music, seems so lustful of poetry; we are treated with colour to unconstrained Shakespearean tags, the peculiar verse of Emily Dickinson and a movement on Sir Thomas Wyatt. Duncker never explains because her French decider has such a ambience for anglophone verse; here is an author, one feels, whose mind is stocked with an considerable form of well review quotations but who is not really observant about deploying them appropriately.

Otherwise, this is an beguiling novel. And in the issue Duncker out-Dan-Browns Dan Brown you will never review a some-more stirring comment of somebody perplexing to find the scold exit to get to Jodrell Bank from the M6.

The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge by Patricia Duncker 272PP, Bloomsbury, �11.99 T �10.99 (PLUS �1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or Books

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