The Music Shop
Review of the novel by Rachel Joyce
Hallelujah!
I rarely listen to music — an kind of music. And this is a novel about music — all kinds of music. But I loved it. And at the end there were tears of joy in my eyes. That’s serious magic.
Memorable passages:
“Clean? What’s music got to do with clean? Where is the humanity in clean? Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?” p. 51
‘Frank was so busy loving other people e had no room to accommodate the fact that someone might turn round and love him back.” p. 59
“Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you. The gaps and the cracks. Because that was where life really happened: when you were brave enough to free-fall. p. 91
“That was why Peg loved the Messiah best of all. Because it showed people they were not alone. No matter about their differences, the music lifted them up and lowered them down, only to raise them even higher. It worked like a spell.” p. 101
“One hundred people sing in a shopping mall. Outside, the air will stink of cheese and onion, people are being mugged, others are starving, the sky is gray, but for one brief and irrational gap in time, there is this beautiful human madness. the world is not terrible after all. pp. 294–295
