'Playing the piano is very much like making love to a beautiful woman ...' The Pianoplayers (1986)

Since Burgess was living in Lugano in Switzerland when he wrote this novel, we can say without exaggeration that it is the work of a Swiss Tony. Which is peculiarly wonderful, because the main theme here is, straightforwardly, that playing a piano is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.

In this novel, and for only the second time in his career, Burgess wrote a female first-person narrator. Like the excellent One Hand Clapping, although perhaps to slightly less excellent effect, the voice he defaults to is markedly less sophisticated than his range of male first-person narrators: Ellen Henshaw, a working class woman from Lancashire without a proper education (supposed to leave school at 14 she actually slips away at 13: 'I didn't mind, I've never been a believer in book learning' [45]) dictating her life story to an amanuensis. At the start of the novel Ellen is an old woman living on the Continent. Indeed, the first chapter is a deftly evocative of the contrasting livelinesses and sleepiness of her small town, Callian ('in the Var, which is in Provence, which is in the South of France'). In return for bed and board, a young writer records her voice, and her life.

1986 was also the year in which Burgess published the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, and it does not surprise us that Ellen Henshaw's life turns out to be a Burgessian David Copperfield act. Dickens, of course, also set out to write an autobiography (the so-called 'autobiographical fragment'). He wrote as far as the primal trauma of his psyche, his demeaning 'abandonment' (as he saw it) in the Blacking Factory, and then stopped, As true history he lost interest after this, and instead re-worked the material as David Copperfield, swapping his initials from DC to CD, adding-to and subtracting-from his life story as narrative exigency, artistic inspiration and psychic wish-fulfilment prompted him, and created a masterpiece. The Pianoplayers is not exactly a masterpiece, though it is certainly an enjoyable and entertaining and funny novel, and there is more going on below the surface that first impressions might suggest. Burgess swaps more than the initials of his name (although 'Ellen Hen(shaw) surely has a half-rhyme flipabout relationship to 'Jon Wilon' if not quite 'John Wilson'): he swaps his own gender, educational entertainment and musical talent. One of the themes of the novel is both that the genius of 'creative expression' is passed down through the generations, and that it takes different forms. Ellen's father is a self-taught lowly pianoplayer (she insists on suturing the gap between 'piano' and 'player', since Billy Henshaw was no concert artist, but worked movie theatres, pubs and low dives). But though he lacks training, and opportunity, he shows himself superbly ingenious and inventive in the business of soundtracking the silent films in 1920s Manchester cinemas. Not just playing fast or slow, major or minor key depending, but turning the disadvantages of his crappy instrument to good purpose:

'All those notes down there in the bass is just a lot of noise, but that's very useful for drums and thunder and so on. And that D there is gone, but it's fine for someone tapping at a window. And that E flat up there near the top has dropped down so it's the same as D flat, and that means I can do a trill on one note very fast' ... my father had stripped all the wooden panels off the piano. so that he could bang the wires with a coalhammer that he'd pinched to make the effect of bells and zithers. He once got himself a sheet of aluminium to shake for thunder, but he'd pinched it off a man who was trying to build his own racing car in the street and there was a row about that. [22]

His genius is wholly unappreciated, and he barely scrapes a living, not helped by his heavy drinking. His daughter Ellen, our narrator, was born when Bill was in the army (First World War), and he returns from the front—the purest bit of actual Burgessian autobiography in the novel, familiar to us from Big Wilson and Little God—to find his wife and four year old son dead of the flu and Ellen gurgling in the cot next door. Ellen grows up quickly, and despite attempts by her father to teach her music, she discovers her genius in sex. Her various erotic adventures make up the bulk of the book's central section. The most detailed accounts of actual sex are when Ellen is underage, a strategy liable to make a 21st-reader pretty uncomfortable. As to the novel's effectiveness as erotica, I can only report the coolness of my personal straight, male reaction. Conceivably a female reader might respond differently: Burgess is scrupulous (rather wincingly so) in recording the pleasurableness of female orgasms and both the appetite for and entitlement of women to sexual gratification. After Ellen has earned pin money with various older men she is initiated into lesbian sex by a dancer from Blackpool, which experience she reports 'disgusted her' although she adds 'there was a part of my brain that could see the point, men being so rough and selfish with it' [104]. Billy dies (of drink-sozzled exhaustion, whilst in the midst of a publicity stunt piano-playing marathon) and Ellen winds up in a high class French brothel, afterwards setting up her own establishment 'at Malmaison, which is where the house of Josephine was when Napoleon kicked her out for not giving him an Heir to the Imperial throne' [154]. She makes a bunch of money, gets off the Continent before the war starts and marries a respectable Englishman. Her son Robert ('born six months after our wedding at Caxton Hall') inherits none of his mother's genius for sex, and more of the ambition than the talent for piano playing. Though he had ‘real ambitions to be a pianist and not just a pianoplayer or joanna-thumper’ [174] it is not until his own son, Ellen's grandson, is born (after Robert's initial, comical inability to consummate his marriage) that pianist genius comes into its own: 'little William Ross, the Child Wonder when he was seven' [205].

We climb the (fanny) hill of the book's central tumulus, and then slide down the far side in a quick string of funny comic setpieces. The best of these is when Robert takes his wife Edna and mother-in-law Mrs Aldridge on an Italian motoring holiday: the poor old mother-in-law suffers a series of indignities, including an encounter with a dancing bear in a barn at midnight and being forced by the beast to dance with it for hours. Mrs Aldridge never really recovers from this, and a few days either the exertion or the indignity kill her off. Robert can't help reflecting on the incident and laughing. 'It’s downright rotten to laugh like that after what poor mother has been through, you heartless beast,' Edna rebukes him. But Mrs Aldridge says:

'He doesn’t worry me, Edna. I’m past worrying about his manner of behaviour.' And then there were no words, just a kind of choky gargling and a sort of distant rattling noise and Mrs Aldridge had slumped over head first onto Robert's back. [189]

Robert and his wife have to load her (large) corpse onto the roof-rack of their fiat.

Underneath this frivolity, though, is something more serious. Its aegis is a series of parallels between sex and music, or more specifically between musical praxis/technique and mastering the skills of pleasing another person in bed. Ellen sets up a fancy brothel under the rubric of 'The London School of Love' (there are other branches in Hamburg and Paris) which promises to educate men into sophisticated sexual technique. The school slogan is 'a woman is like a piano':

A pianoforte if expertly played can give out music whose meaning is more spiritual than physical, though the physical appeal of sheer sound is not, of course, to be discounted. No man considers himself capable of playing the instrument unless he has been trained to do so and is willing to practise regularly and rigorously, whereas most men consider themselves capable of engaging in the act of Love with nothing to guide them but appetite and instinct. The purpose of the School of Love ... [is] to turn men into sensitive and skilled discourses of the Music of Love. [170]

It's a pretty fair point, though there's one obvious flaw in the analogy: it situates the woman as a passive object to be played upon, and the man as an active player, which, it goes without saying, is an assumption hip-deep in sexism. I suppose, to give Burgess the benefit of the doubt, there's nothing here that necessarily genders the patient and agent roles: women can presumably learn to 'play' on men, as much as women on women and men on men. I do like the implied stress on digital technique, actually: if only as a counterblast to the mystic vagueness of all the quasi-Lawrentian fucking that happens in so many books, by, it seems, sheer force of erotic sublimity.

There's also a musical, or rather a keyboard-y, formal structure to the whole: much less sophisticated and complicated than Napoleon Symphony (say), but unmissable and in its way eloquent. When she is a young girl, and her Dad is too poor to afford his own piano, he draws the keys on a plank of wood to teach her the skill:

The white note to the left of the first of the twin black notes, not the triplets, is always C. At the top or in the bottom it makes no difference, always C. The C in the middle of the joanna is middle C, which stands to reason. Then all the rest—D E F G A B, down as well as up: BAG FED. You can play the scale of C eight times over very fast from the bottom to the top, just by using your thumbnail. [26]

There's some mnemonics for useful chords, and a few interesting tunes: CABBAGE and FACE and of course CABBAGEFACE (this is doubly nice, since the French for 'cabbage', 'chou', is also used as a term of affection across the Channel, an idiom Ellen herself uses: 'my cabbage', [154]).

A keyboard has thirteen keys covering the octave from (say) middle C to high C: eight white and five black. The Pianoplayers has thirteen chapters, although Ellen calls the final one Twelve and a Half, 'because I am superstitious' [173]—and also, I suppose, because the final note is only half a new note, since it is the same note raised an octave. I say 'raised', since I'm assuming that Ellen's narrative (from penniless Manchester tike to wealthy retiree in the South of France) is one tracing a CDEFGABC upward trajectory, rather than being BAG FED down into misery.

This in turn gives Burgess a structure to write to, which may explain why the middle act, Ellen's rise from whore to madam, is so skimped. And if the later life is squeezed, this is presumably because Burgess had to decide either to fit everything into 13 chapters or else expand the whole novel to two octaves. Chapter 1 is C, the keynote: Ellen in her house in France, and her life; Chapter 13 (or 12½) returns us to France and her present-day. Chapter 2 (C#) introduces dissonance when set alongside her pleasant later life: a mother and brother dead, an impoverished upbringing and an improvident, boozy Dad. Chapter 3 (D), when played against the C, is if less dissonant then certainly no harmony, and rather looks forward to future resolution. Chapter 4 (E♭) combines with C to suggest a minor chord or interval, and details how Billy drinks away his chances of regular employment and makes such an exhibition of himself at the cinema that he's blacklisted playing movie theatres thereafter (the chapter ends 'Dad had really done for himself this time; he had that' [53]). Chapter 5 is E, a major harmony with C, and the place in the novel where Ellen describes her first sexual experiences, her first orgasm and enters into that aspect of her life that most fully expresses her genius.

So it goes on: Chapter 6 (F) is another major interval: Ellen out of school, and she and her Dad relocated to Blackpool, with many more opportunities for fun. Billy gets a job playing piano on the pier, Ellen gets a job waiting in a 'caffy off the prom' ('I know I have not spelt café correctly but it seems to me to be wrong to use the same word for two very different things, a French café bearing no likeness at all to the British variety' [73]). Chapter 7 (F#) introduces a sour, dissonant note, when Ellen is sexually assaulted by their landlord, the creepy Mr Flushing. Chapter 8 (G) resolves this incident into broad comedy: Billy has started a relationship with a dancer called Maggie whose husband, Ray Romano Morgan, is a fiddle-player, and who initiates Ellen into lesbianism. When Ray bursts in upon Maggie, Billy and Ellen, and the landlord and his wife come in, Ellen exposes Mr Flushing for the creep he is in front of his formidable wife. Billy and Ellen are kicked out of their lodgings, though, and Chapter 9 (G# or A♭) repeats Chapter 4 in its new location: drunk, Billy fights on stage with Ray Romano Morgan and loses his post. Chapter 10 (A) is effectively the climax to Billy's story: as a moneymaking stunt he sets himself up as 'BILLY HENSHAW THE MARATHON MAN NONSTOP PIANO PLAYING FOR THIRTY DAYS AND NIGHTS CAN HE DO IT?' [126]. This is both triumphant and (the major sixth from C to A is not a satisfying harmony by itself) tragic; for Billy wears himself out and dies. Chapter 11 (B♭) begins with her 'heartbroken' [145] and details her experiences as a prostitute: not mournfully but hardly major key stuff. Chapter 12 (B) intimates a joyful resolution to the scale: Ellen is 40, well-off and sets up her 'School of Love'. The narrative shifts towards her son and his comedic travails, before rounding off with a re-emergence of the true musical genius in Ellen's grandson:

The kid had a natural instinct which his father did the utmost to help come out, and it was really the Family Gift at last. It had been trying to get through for a long time, failing with my dad and succeeding in a twisted sort of way with his daughter (A Metaphorical Sort of Way, says Petulia) , failing again with Robert and then bursting like a flower with little Billy. [206]

It's a perfectly serviceable structure, although it can hardly help being a little linear, a bit too simple to give the more complex shades of reality and pathos to the simply-told life story. A five finger exercise played with one hand. Makes a joyful noise, though.