Taggie, Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife, has cancer, introducing mortality into a series that usually avoids it. Bianca, their daughter, falls in love with a footballer, and Rupert buys a local club to keep her close. The club achieves improbable league successes. The narrative also includes earlier saga material centered on Rupert’s son Marcus, who is engaged to violinist-turned-conductor Abigail Rosen. The situation collapses when Marcus is revealed to be gay and involved with a Russian ballet dancer. The stories emphasize upper-class cruelty, artistic life, and romantic entanglements, with detailed classical music research shaping parts of the plot.
"Taggie has cancer, which is bracing, since the Chronicles as a whole rarely brush with mortality. I was astonished to learn that Cooper did 15 months of rewrites, following interventions from a sensitivity reader; it is not that sensitive, certainly not on class. Bianca, Rupert and Taggie's daughter, has fallen in love with a footballer (from the gu'er the Ts are silent) and her father buys a local club to keep them both in the postcode. Cue improbable league successes that make your heart soar."
"Rupert is barely in it, but his son Marcus his son by his first wife, the panicky American Helen is technically the love interest: he's affianced to the heroine, violinist turned conductor Abigail Rosen, but it all capsizes when it turns out Marcus is gay and having an affair with a Russian ballet dancer. That doesn't count as a spoiler, by the way, since pianist Marcus has been gay-coded as a thorn in his hyper-masculine father's side since he was about two years old."
"Cooper is good on the peculiar familial cruelties of the English upper classes, the way they casually, irreparably screw their children's lives just by caring too much about stupid things: do they have a high voice, do they eat asparagus right? There's a lot of densely researched classical music, the result of three years' field work with real live orchestras; if you skip all that, you can bring it down to a more manageable 400 pages."
"This is an interesting shadow-boxing instalment of the Campbell-Black saga. Rupert is barely in it, but his son Marcus his son by his first wife, the panicky American Helen is technically the love interest: he's affianced to the heroine, violinist turned conductor Abigail Rosen, but it all capsizes when it turns out Marcus is gay and having an affair with a Russian ballet dancer. That doesn't count as a spoiler, by the way, since pianist Marcus has been gay-coded as a thorn in his hyper-masculine father's side since he was about two years old."
Read at www.theguardian.com
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