The Music Room: A Memoir

by William Fiennes

Overview

A bittersweet description of an ancient family house in an enchanted setting, and of growing up with a damaged brother. "Sublimely evocative."—The New Yorker.

William Fiennes spent his childhood in a moated castle, the perfect environment for a child with a brimming imagination. It is a house alive with history, beauty, and mystery, but the young boy growing up in it is equally in awe of his brother Richard. Eleven years older and a magnetic presence, Richard suffers from severe epilepsy. His illness influences the rhythms of the family and the house’s internal life, and his story inspires a journey, interwoven with a loving recollection, toward an understanding of the mind.

This is a song of home, of an adored brother and the miracle of consciousness. The chill of dark historical places coexists with the warmth and chatter of the family kitchen; the surrounding landscapes are distinguished by ancient trees, secret haunts, the moat’s depths and temptations. Bursting with tender detail, The Music Room is a sensuous tribute to place, memory, and the permanence of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393338782
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/13/2010
Pages:	226
Sales rank:	689,276
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

William Fiennes’s first book, The Snow Geese, was a winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He lives in England.

Editorial Reviews

"Exemplary."

The Telegraph

"Humane rather than melodramatic, a lovely memoir rich with poignancy of family and place."

Wall Street Journal

"A haunting lament for a life that could have been and the love that remained for a broken mind."

Amanda Foreman

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A childhood in a castle, complete with a moat, suits of armor, and ancestral portraits for company. A place bursting with beauty and mystery, the chill of its history flushed with the warmth and bustle of the family kitchen. Such was the family home of William Fiennes, a spirited boy with a large imagination. But it was also the home of his adored older brother, the magnetic, charismatic Richard. Yet Richard has a tragic flaw. He suffers from a severe form of epilepsy.

\ \ As William passes through his childhood and school years, he quickly learns that Richard's illness sets the mood and rhythm of the house -- his brother's good days measured against the number and intensity of his bad ones. Inevitably, Richard's anger and darkness (a result of his medication and the brain damage that occurred during his seizures) comes to dominate life at home, and neither the enchantment of the setting nor the love and support of William's family can make them disappear.

\ \ Fiennes's finely nuanced and exquisitely crafted memoir is at once an exploration of the human mind and a celebration of place, memory, and relationships. Set against a backdrop of lavish gardens, secret rooms, and watchful gargoyles, The Music Room is a tribute to the permanence of love and the wonder of memory. \ (Holiday 2009 Selection)

Just after Fiennes (Snow Geese) was born, his family moved into a medieval English estate that included a castle surrounded by a moat. The estate was an inheritance passed down from his father's ancestors since the 14th century. The castle in particular proves to be the book's most evocative metaphor for how every man is and is not an island. The book is part memoir, part journalistic profile and philosophical digression, all revolving around Richard, Fiennes eldest brother, who suffered from extreme epilepsy. In taut and exacting prose that profits grandly from vivid descriptions of the estate grounds and the working-class people who care for it, Fiennes recounts life alone in a home that was mostly only semiprivate. It was often used by TV and film crews as a backdrop. His older twin brother and sister went to boarding school while Richard “convalesced” in an insane asylum. Fiennes recalls the trials of familial love punctuated by a brother's violent seizures and outbursts (once scalding their mother's face with a hot cast-iron pan). His portrayal of Richard, moreover, is at once affectionate and brazenly honest. Fiennes allows him to come off as sick, magical yet somewhat boring (he talks incessantly about his favorite soccer team). The book feels fluffed up at times with asides on the history of epilepsy, but more often than not these serve the greater purpose of evoking a sense of continuity and reflection. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A scion of a venerable British family presents a chronicle of his afflicted brother and their unusual childhood home. "Our house," writes Fiennes (The Snow Geese: A Story of Home, 2002), "was almost seven hundred years old." It was, in fact, the ancestral family castle, equipped with suits of armor, rusting halberds and flaking portraits of severe forebears. There was a gift shop in the stables and a broad moat where Fiennes swam and fished as a child. He climbed the roofs, bicycled in the Great Hall, explored the secret corridors of the attic Barracks and played in the King's Chamber. Care of the ancient house was important, but not as important as the care of the author's older brother, who was subject to severe epileptic seizures. Richard was also afflicted with frontal lobe brain damage, perhaps due to medications or the injuries received during severe tonic-clonic attacks. In addition to his graceful evocation of their stately Tudor home and his brother's experience with a debilitating illness, Fiennes writes elegantly about Mum on the viola in the music room and Dad on the bridge welcoming tourists and film crews. It's a verdant, elegiac recollection, sometimes suddenly shifting from one narrative state to another, leaping oddly-but fluidly-to the present tense from the past. Interspersed is a precis of the history of research regarding his brother's status epilecticus. An artful memory piece about a unique home life.

Kirkus Reviews

"The Music Room has an elegiac feel, not least ­because Mr. Fiennes writes about his family with such care and dignity. His descriptions of Richard's ­outbursts and seizures have the brutality of truth ­without any of the modern memoirist's tendency to sensationalize. We are brought deep into the castle that was a family's home, yet what we learn still has an air about it of privacy and restraint."

The Wall Street Journal - Meghan Cox Gurdon

"This is no misery memoir...on the contrary, it is a thoughtful and lyrical account of an extraordinary childhood."

Guardian (UK) - John Burnside

"Evocative and wistful…glows with the joy of remembrance."

Sunday Times [London]

"Fiennes has a poet's gift for creating images that are fresh and original...yet so natural as to seem almost inevitable."

Spectator (UK)

"This is a moving book, written with sensitivity. Fiennes writes with great precision and skill; his images stay with you."

Financial Times

"It is a beautiful and fortifying book, even a great one."

Daily Telegraph (UK) - Nicholas Shakespeare

"Beautifully written…detailed without being overblown, precise without being precious."

New Statesman (UK)