MEMOIR: The Music Room By William FiennesPicador, 216pp. £16.99
THERE WERE FIVE Fiennes siblings born in the 1950s and 1960s: first Richard, an epileptic; then the twins, Martin and Susannah; then Thomas, who died in infancy; and finally, William, the writer of the work here under review.
Since the 14th century the family had lived on an estate near Oxford. The author’s life there made him what he is and part of his purpose here is to celebrate that.
The house (the author doesn’t give its name), a mix of medieval and Elizabethan structures, was surrounded by a moat in which Fiennes, throughout childhood, fished for pike, punted and swam. Beyond stretched the park and beyond that again a network of estate farms and pathways, copses and an abandoned village that he never tired of exploring.
The property was open to the public and Fiennes grew up showing visitors around. Film companies used the house for costume dramas, which brought him into contact with well-known stars (serving Sir Ian McKellen in the estate shop was a highlight), while the grounds were the location for English Civil War battles as re-staged by the Sealed Knot Society, village fetes and amateur dramatic Shakespearean productions.
Fiennes’s evocation of the place that was his home and his family’s source of income is marvellous. He is adept at bringing complex events (film shoots, mock battles, am-dram productions) to life, and his rendering of the talk of his parents’ employees, who kept the house and grounds in order, is clever, wry, funny and touching.
Were this book simply an account of a stately home at the close of the 20th century it would be highly recommended. Fiennes, however, wants to do more than just report on that phenomenon. He also wants to explore his family and the tragedies that assailed it.
On Thomas’s early death he is surprisingly positive. Though it provoked and baffled him he never felt Thomas as an absence. On the contrary, he always felt Thomas was close by, just out of sight. Richard, on the other hand, was very much in view and the huge impact he and his illness had is what drives the narrative.
IT BEGAN WITH an ear infection when he was two and a half. Then, one night, provoked by high fever, he started to convulse. “Doctors told my parents these febrile convulsions weren’t uncommon among children, and that in most cases they passed without further complications.” They were wrong. Richard began to suffer frequent seizures. Eventually, he went into intensive care, at which point the doctors used a term no one in the family had heard before: Status epilepticus.
The epilepsy, according to the neurologist who reported on Richard following this diagnosis, had caused “cerebral atrophy in the frontal lobes”, or brain damage. Richard was sent to a redbrick Victorian hospital near Reading, from which he would return for weekends and holidays smelling of “hospital . . . catering, dirty clothes and disinfectant”.
It wasn’t long before Richard’s home visits became problematic. There were the epileptic attacks of course (an average of five a month) and then there were “the cognitive and behavioural problems associated with frontal-lobe damage: lack of initiative, insight, flexibility and self-control”. Richard veered between anger and rage, on the one hand, and terrible guilt when he was desperate to atone, on the other. It was not easy, but Mr and Mrs Fiennes, according to William’s account (and I’ve no reason to doubt him), were model parents; patient, long-suffering, loving and indefatigable
William, in contrast, was exasperated and resentful. He did not like his brother. He did not like his fury or his coarseness. He did not like the way he controlled the house with his bad moods and the threat of violence. At the same time, paradoxically, Richard’s violence excited him greatly.
At first, William assumed (even though he knew his brother was epileptic) that Richard was personally responsible for his behaviour. He didn’t understand that Richard’s manner was the consequence of the damage to his brain caused by the epilepsy. William wasn’t the first person in history to make this mistake and the book’s other strand, besides the domestic, is Fiennes’s account of the growth of our understanding of epilepsy, from the time of the Greeks, when epilepsy was blamed on supernatural possession, to the present, when it is understood as a medical condition.
FIENNES’S ACCOUNT OF the developing science is lucid and ingenious and he contrives things so that his narrative strands comment on and amplify each other. Thus his historical survey reaches the point where scientists finally grasped that epilepsy causes the brain damage that causes “bad behaviour”, at the very moment when, in his personal narrative (this was in late adolescence), he finally understood his brother’s actions were because of brain damage rather than out of choice. The way the scientific and the domestic stories work together is a considerable feat.
The Music Roomis beautifully written, and by turns lyrical, nostalgic and surprising. It is also unusual. There are many memoirs in the world and there are many accounts of scientific progress but there are precious few books that do both as well as Fiennes's does. Oliver Sacks's work springs to mind, of course, though his books, marvellous as they are, aren't nearly as accomplished as this one. The way that Fiennes deploys and marshals language here really is quite exceptional. I do have a tiny caveat about the end and the account of Richard's death, at the age of 41, in his sleep during a night-seizure: it struck me as slightly underpowered, but other than that this is a brilliant work that combines social observation, personal testimony and medical history in a unique, fresh and utterly captivating way.
Carlo Gébler is a writer; he is also the current Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast