The Traveling Horn Player

A deliciously subversive British novelist who deserves a wider American audience, Trapido (Brother of the More Famous Jack) delivers a clever story of a group of people--in London, Cambridge and Edinburgh--connected by the accidental death of a teenage schoolgirl. When Lydia Dent contacts novelist Jonathan Goldman to ask his help in writing an essay on the poems of German Romantic Wilhelm Muller (set to music by Schubert as Die schone Mullerin), she unwittingly sets in motion a complex tragicomedy of errors that eventually brings together star-crossed characters: Lydia's sister Ellen; Jonathan's daughter Stella, who is Ellen's friend at Edinburgh University; Izzy Tench, a scuzzy yet brilliant painter who fathers Stella's child; Peregrine (Pen) Massingham, whom Stella marries; Jonathan's wife, Katherine, who befriends Jonathan's lover, Sonia, who is patron to Izzy; Jonathan's brother Roger, who late in the story falls in love with Ellen. Their lives intersect within a net of intricate yet plausible coincidences that, remarkably, rarely seem to be mere exigency of plot. One is reminded of a Shakespearean play where all the players keep bumping into one another in the magical forest. Only toward the end of the novel do the coincidental meetings stretch credulity a bit too far, but by then readers are likely to be snugly entrapped by the plot's momentum. As Trapido's characters experience love, loss, grief and plucky survival, the narrative twists are accomplished with a sleight of hand so subtle that the reader is often stunned. Trapido's dry wit and acerbic observations, especially of Britain's class system, are consistently engaging. Her depiction of Pen's very Catholic, very parsimonious, aggressively athletic Scottish family is worth the price of the book alone. (Jan.)