Escher's Rollercoaster

I just finished reading a masterwork by M. C. Escher—in the form of a detective novel about an elusive piece of music. Or maybe I just finished riding it. I have the same exhilarated, queasy feeling I associate with debarking from a particularly well-crafted wooden roller coaster.

Robert D. Sutherland's The Farringford Cadenza, published by Pikestaff Press, led me up stairs that descend into the bowels of organized crime, down industrial avenues that end in open ports, and through a maze of second-hand shops, cheap hotel rooms, sumptuous concert halls, and vehicles ranging from trains and planes to pickup trucks and limousines—all to arrive where I started, laughing from joy at the ride. It also placed me in the company of characters I rarely deign to identify with, including a duplicitous and somewhat clumsy detective, a morally bankrupt accountant, a couple of violence-prone professional thieves, a Rasta man, and a priapic pillar of the community.

The novel starts out with the deliberate sense of anticipation that only a gifted storyteller can construct. Like an Escher print, it begins with clarity of line: a train, slowing to a crawl, carries a dead man whose pajamas are oddly awry. An obituary identifies the man. News items decry the loss to the world of a cadenza the dead man had composed but never published.

With these spare but intentional strokes, Sutherland identifies the mystery, configures the subsequent quest, and encodes the novel with underlying meanings available only to the reader, who is never omniscient but always one step ahead of the crowd. Like a roller coaster, the novel chugs slowly and carefully out of the gate, groove to track. Once the reader has a grasp of its foundational events, the story takes off, collecting characters and confounding expectations at an increasing, mind-rattling pace.

Ostensibly, this is a novel about a cadenza—which I now know is not a piece of furniture but an instrumental solo passage in a concerto. Until the nineteenth century at least, cadenzas were solo virtuoso performances. Often, they were improvisational, never to be repeated, and thus ephemeral, like ballet, or theatre, or any other live, embodied experience. As the century progressed, the cadenza fell prey to our modern mania for recording, preserving, and attempting to "keep" experiences. Thus, the novel's illustrious Mr. Farringford has meticulously composed his celebrated cadenza, a masterwork within the masterwork of his concerto. His manuscript is the engine that drives the story.

In life, the human impulse to hang on to what is, in essence, ephemeral creates heartache and drama. In Sutherland's novel, it creates the same thing—plot. When Farringford dies mysteriously after performing the cadenza, the score disappears, too, and it becomes, over time, an icon of desire and a grail. For one collector, it promises the satisfaction of a hunger to have and thus in his mind to be all that is first, most, and only. For another, it represents mastery.

For a few seekers, the cadenza has become the embodiment of love or the lack of it. For a good number more, it's worth nothing but cash. And for one man, who dogs the trail of the others, it's worth more lost than found. These competing desires run a classical gamut up, down, and around the overlapping worlds of high society, high finance, and art, revealing each to be a complex and oddly funny intersection of ambition and desire.

The novel roars into action in Baltimore, where a hapless grad student finds the music in a secondhand shop. But it trundles from Baltimore to New York City and back several times, with an additional short jaunt to St. Croix, in a chain of events that link Farringford's family, his colleagues and patrons, collectors, musicians, academics, island dwellers—and those privileged few who once heard the cadenza. The privileged include a man who wants to publish it, a man who reveres it as an aphrodisiac, and a ridiculous, vicious man who thinks the cadenza...