Rose Tremain deserves a Hallelujah chorus dedicated just to her: a decade after the appearance of Restoration--and with a range of stunning novels and short story collections before and after it--now comes her glorious and enthralling Music and Silence.

This treasure house of delights, as haunting as it is pleasurable, teems with characters, real and imagined; with intrigues, searches, betrayals, in vivid scene after scene which loop in and out, back and forth, like overlapping and repeated chords.

King Christian IV of Denmark is, in the year of 1630, living in a limbo of fear and rage for his life, his country's ruin, and his wife's not-so-secret adultery. He consoles himself with the weaving of impossible dreams and with music--played by his Royal Orchestra in the freezing cellar at Rosenborg while he listens in his cosy Vinterstue above. Music, he hopes, will create the sublime order he craves. Kirsten, his devious wife, is a continual maker of Beautiful Plans to outwit, avenge, feed her greed. And she detests music.

The awkward duty of assuaging the King's miseries falls to his English lutenist, Peter Claire, his "Angel", whilst Emilia Tilsen must bend to Kirsten's every whim. Yet what Peter and Emilia seek is each other, largely in silence both necessary and cruelly imposed. Other stories, each of them full of fabulous and often joyful and witty invention, intertwine through the Royal Court's machinations: the King's mother who hoards her gold in secret; his boyhood friend, Bror, a tormenting memory; the villagers who suffer and wait in the frozen Numedal; Emilia's mute young brother Marcus. And in Ireland, Johnnie O'Fingal, once a kind father and husband, is driven mad by hearing music of utter divinity in his dreams, but which neither he nor Peter Claire can make earthbound. His devoted but spirited wife has distracted herself with Claire, but now finds herself rejected. Palpable with desire and longing, this extraordinary narrative builds its grand themes in storytelling that is both profound and wonderfully satisfying. --Ruth Petrie

A bestselling novel from a well-loved, critically acclaimed novelist of prodigious breadth of talent

In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians have to perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, he understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil are waging war to the death. "Music and Silence" tells a story that is both violent and tender, shocking and consoling. This is a bold, uncompromising, wildly original book which demonstrates that in the day-to-day business of living, as in a fairy tale, not everything is totally black, nor wholly white.

'Best thing from Denmark since Hamlet' John Julius Norwich
'Lyrical, voluptuous...splendid...A sumptuous drama lit by the glamorous torchlight of the courtly past' Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Sunday Times

In the year 1629, a young English lutenist named Peter Claire arrives at the Danish Court to join King Christian IV's Royal Orchestra. From the moment when he realises that the musicians perform in a freezing cellar underneath the royal apartments, Peter Claire understands that he's come to a place where the opposing states of light and dark, good and evil, are waging war to the death.

Designated the King's 'Angel' because of his good looks, he finds himself falling in love with the young woman who is the companion of the King's adulterous and estranged wife, Kirsten. With his loyalties fatally divided between duty and passion, how can Peter Claire find the path that will realise his hopes and save his soul?

'Music & Silence is a magnificent novel...a brilliant book which will repay many readings' Michael Ardetti, The Times

'She is the best historical novelist of her generation. She evokes the past...with sensuality, wit and superb sleights of hand...The plot is ingenious...an unforgettable tapestry of Eros and of art' A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard

'A superb novel...a wonderful, joyously noisy book' Steven Poole, Guardian

'Tremain's achievement in Music & Silence is extraordinary...A narrative as funny as it is compelling' Patrick Gale, Daily Telegraph

Rose Tremain lives in North London and Norwich, with the biographer Richard Holmes.
Her books have won many prizes including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker and made into a film; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Her most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short story Award and the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Two of her books (The Colour and The Way I Found Her) are in development as films, and she is currently working on a TV screenplay to star Sir Ian McKellen.

2007-08-26 An imaginative entry into a little known world

The book opens in 1629, when Peter Claire, a young English lutenist, arrives to take up his post as a musician at the court of King Christian IV of Denmark. It then moves in a series of flashbacks and forward movements from this moment, both for Claire and for the King; for Kirsten Munk, the King's morganatic second wife; for Emilia Tilsen, one of Kirsten's young maid-servants; for the Countess O'Fingle in Ireland, whose husband is tortured unto madness by a tune he once heard and cannot recapture; for Marcus, Emilia's waif-like little brother; for Johann, her father in Jutland; and for the Rev. James Claire, Peter's father in Suffolk. For each of these characters Rose Tremain has created a distinctive style and voice, each a pleasure to read. She has great descriptive powers of people, place, and atmosphere. The personalities also, and the shifting relationships between them, are very distinctive: there is the huge, restless and tormented king, strangely confiding in Peter Claire; a truly monstrous regiment of women: the termagant and adulterous Kirsten, twenty-two years the King's junior, ruthlessly selfish and bullying all her attendants except for Emilia; Ellen Marsvin, Kirsten's mother; Sofia, the Queen Mother; and Magdalena, Marcus' wicked stepmother. Almost all the characters in the book are unhappy, and an air of sadness suffuses the whole novel.

Christian IV and Kirsten are certainly historical figures, as is the King's later mistress, Vibeke Kruse. Many times one feels sure that descriptions of the Danish court are based on historical research, as probably are the superstitious beliefs held by some of the characters. Personally I would have liked to know which of the other characters are inventions: Bror Brorson, for instance, Christian's boyhood friend and favourite who cannot read or write and who is banished for years from the court during Christian's minority: was there such a person? If he and others are invented, they are a great tribute to the richness of Tremain's imagination.

The energy of the book seems to me to flag somewhat in the second and third part of the novel, and there is some meandering; but it builds up to a tense ending and remains a remarkable achievement.