...fuga...a novel

Eva Byrne is twenty-five years old, a gifted violinist forging a career in London, when her life begins to unravel in the wake of traumatic events. Ostensibly a novel about music, … fuga equally explores the territory of loss, identity, memory and place. Eva’s close first person journal dissembles and reconstructs the personal narrative that has shaped her life and her choices, interweaving past and present in a destabilised interior monologue that is frequently at odds with the more public dialogue offered through interspersed letters, interviews, reviews and blogs. In Part One, Eva finds herself on the remote Orkney island of Hoy. Offered sanctuary at the home of her good friend, the eminent composer, Fergus Cunningham, she attempts to grapple with the recent events that have sparked her spiral into a not unfamiliar pattern of self-destruction. Part Two sees Eva returning to Australia, attempting to reconcile with more distant events that she has spent nine years in London trying to forget. The exegetical essay, ‘The Musicalisation of … fuga: how music influenced and shaped the writing of a novel’, explores the idea of ‘musicalisation’: how the metaphoric appropriation of musical ideas and strategies within a novelistic narrative helped to shape the novel’s ideas and form. Beginning with a theoretical introduction to the idea of musicalisation, and incorporating a broader literary and theoretical context, each subsequent chapter of the exegesis then uses a key work of music, or a key musical idea relevant to the writing of … fuga, to further elucidate the ideas regarding musicalisation that the writing of the novel generated, and which in turn inspired both the theoretical research and the ongoing creative work. It is as much an exploration of my development as a writer as it is an exploration of the novel that eventually emerged from this development. In a broader sense it is an exploration of the art of the novel – what a novel is, and what a novel does – since, as a first-time novelist, this was the question central to my process.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2012