Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Las Vegas Syndrome

According to urban folklore the worst thing that can happen to anyone in Las Vegas is to win first time at the slot machines. Winning out of the gate produces a feeling of hope if not invincibility that tempts one to rationalise doubling one's bet until, well, ultimate disaster.

Johanna Skibsrud is undoubtedly a skilful writer. But her 2010 prize-winning The Sentimentalists, written at age at age 30, seems to have given her the same sense of overconfidence as the novice winning gambler. She has more than doubled her bet with Quartet for the End of Time. I think she's lost.

Skibsrud's title is purportedly an homage to the 1941 chamber-piece by Olivier Messiaen. Like the musical piece, her book has four main parts - her characters, his instruments - that fit somewhat unconventionally together in terms of narrative flow. So there is a vague similarity at that level. And music scored for piano, clarinet, violin and cello is unusual. Possibly therefore the combination of the book's central characters - Sutton and Alden Kelly and Douglas and Arthur Sinclair are intended to be somewhat unconventional. The first two are establishment figures and the latter two working class stiffs. It’s a real stretch but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt.



Like Messiaen, Skibsrud plays with the idea of time. He through his use of techniques like augmented, diminished and Hindu rhythms and even the use of bird song to escape temporal musical conventions; she by recycling through events from different narrative perspectives. She also eliminates entirely the conventional distinction between direct and indirect speech so that the rhythm of the text doesn't suffer from interruptions, as it were, by the characters.

The problem with this latter technique is that all the characters end up speaking like Skibsrud even if they start out like someone else. For example, Arthur Sinclair's recounting of his Siberian war experience is disconcertingly articulate and erudite in comparison with his folksy, down-home, mid-West conversation. So not revelatory of a novel concept of time, merely confusing. All her 'instruments' become drably the same, lacking Messiaen's unusual harmonies and coloration.

Both works are divided into seven sections with an additional interlude. But what correspondence there is between Messiaen's piece and the book is beyond me. Messiaen opens, for example, with a delicate dawn chorus of celestial birdsong which then makes a dramatic and unmistakeable transition to the voice of the angel who insistently announces his presence and purpose in strident musical language.

In Skibsrud, on the other hand, the first section is used, in a somewhat enigmatic but nonetheless bland way, to set up the motive force of her story: a lie told by Sutton as a teenager, vindicating her brother and incriminating the elder Sinclair. This then leads into the back-story of the Sinclairs. I detect not the slightest literary hint of heavenly birdsong nor the apocalyptic angel, just the same relentless prose on and on without variation.

Perhaps the central conceit of the book is also to be found in these first sections. Messiaen bases his work on the dramatic verses of the tenth chapter of the biblical book of Revelation:

"Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars."

Whether one interprets Messiaen as referring to the literal end of the world, the end of musical time or the entry of an individual soul into a realm of heavenly piece, it is difficult to imagine how Skibsrud intended to approach this kind of cosmic scheme. A young girl telling a lie, even when that lie ramifies significantly among a small group of people, is hardly of existential, or even generalizable import. Skibsrud’s title is a travesty. Her choice of title may indeed have been inspired by a Messiaenic(!) experience but it certainly can't be justified by that experience, which is undetectable in the story.

Towards the beginning of the book Arthur Sinclair makes an observation on his war-time trauma in Siberia: "We are always so quick, aren't we, to translate what we see - the pure material of the world - into our own image. We refuse to let it rest...as it first arrives." I agree. And I think Ms Skibsrud might have been a little too quick on the draw trying to assimilate her experience of Messiaen's music into her literary self-image.

My suggestion is to stay away from the high stakes tables for a while.

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