William Fiennes spent his childhood in a magical place, 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 energy influences the rhythms of the family and the house's internal life, and his story inspires a journey, interwoven with loving recollection, towards an understanding of the mind. This is a song of home, of an adored brother and of the miracle of consciousness.
Reviews
The Literary Review
Diana Athill
"Fiennes, who excels at description to an extent rare today, makes it real – and beautiful – so that simply to learn what it was like to be a child who had the good fortune to run free in such a place makes his book worth reading. But there is more to it than that... Interesting though they are, I felt at first that [the chapters about epilepsy research] added nothing to the story... I think now, however, [they] play a part similar to that of the bass line in a piano piece... The book’s chief strength, however, is the immediacy of its descriptions."
01/04/2009
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The Daily Mail
Christopher Hudson
"...despite the tragedy at its heart, this is an enchanting book. It is about a small boy - virtually an only child since his three siblings were a decade older - growing up in an extraordinary setting... What Fiennes has done is to create a portrait of his damaged brother vivid enough that he will not be forgotten... All this is recounted in a prose which is almost musical in its vividness and exactness."
03/04/2009
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The Spectator
Maggie Fergusson
"Fiennes has a poet’s gift for creating images that are fresh and original, and yet so natural as to seem almost inevitable... [He] has a keen ear for voices and dialogue, and when he recalls Richard’s angry exchanges with his parents, the pages bristle with tension... Running through the book, interleaved with his recollections, is a study of epilepsy through the centuries...The research is deep, wide-ranging and gripping."
01/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Nicholas Shakespeare
"As a demonstration of how to write with honesty and discretion about a dysfunctional, out-of-control family member who, eventually, has to be removed from the house, The Music Room is exemplary... [It] must have been extraordinarily difficult to write, to avoid the pitfalls and the toes it needs to avoid, but Fiennes pulls it off. It is a beautiful and fortifying book, even a great one."
02/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Anne Chisholm
"One of the great achievements of this book is the way that Richard is shown not as a tragic case history but as a brave, lovable and infinitely touching character, with a passion for puns, herons and football... For all the sadness, this is not a sorrowful book. Fiennes has exceptional gifts, and he has written a small masterpiece, a tribute to the power of place, family and memory."
06/05/2009
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The New Statesman
Rachel Aspden
"The Music Room is beautifully written, detailed without being overblown, precise without being precious. Fiennes has a talent for surprising similes – jackdaws perch on a roof “clacking like snooker balls”, lily pads sit on the moat’s surface “like jam papers”."
09/04/2009
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The Financial Times
William Leith
"This is a moving book, written with sensitivity. Fiennes writes with great precision and skill; his images will stay with you. There’s a message here, too: people who live in castles are just like everybody else."
13/04/2009
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The Guardian
John Burnside
"...astute and tender... This is no misery memoir - on the contrary, it is a thoughtful and lyrical account of an extraordinary childhood - yet reading The Music Room one cannot help but be awed by the depth and persistence of the love this family feels for their damaged brother and son, and by their ability to live so fully and so gladly with their burden."
04/04/2009
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The Independent
Virginia Ironside
"Apart from the unnecessary padding in which, from time to time, Fiennes writes about the history of epilepsy, this is an exceptionally honest, beautifully-written and observed memoir of a strange childhood, touching in its description of a situation about which, while others might have moaned, appears to have been simply accepted and absorbed, as best it could, into daily life... a memoir full of curiosity and affection."
03/04/2009
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The Observer
Adam Mars-Jones
"William Fiennes is a considerable prose stylist, an exquisite describer, but he seems to fight against the emotional directness required by a book of this sort... A therapist might see something traumatised about the combination in these memories of visual clarity and emotional blankness... Perhaps the self-suppression is particular to the author and represents the conviction that he isn't entitled, with his fully functioning brain, to lodge any complaints against life."
12/04/2009
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The Sunday Times
Andrew Holgate
"Fiennes's portrait of his parents during this traumatic period is touching. They float through the book, ghostlike, their feelings glimpsed only fitfully by the impressionable young boy... Unfortunately, such delicacy often eludes the author when it comes to Richard. Although he tries hard, he never achieves sufficient empathy to bring his sibling fully to life... Such failings fatally unbalance a book where the house and Richard journey through the narrative side by side."
29/03/2009
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