Orpheus Lost
by Janette Turner Hospital
W.W. Norton, HK$250
Janette Turner Hospital's plot finds high gear within a few pages and starts moving - from Auschwitz to Iraq and to Harvard's urbanity, via mathematics, classical music and Greek mythology.
In the Greek myth, Hades gives Orpheus the chance to save his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld by luring her with his incomparable musicianship, on the condition that he not look back as she walks to the surface. In Turner Hospital's world the three central characters are drawn into the great catastrophe of the modern world - Iraq - because of an obsession with their past.
For Mishka, that longing goes back to the womb. Playing an oud in a sound booth, the Australian music student at Harvard feels 'cradled'. 'He supposed he must have been happy in the nine floating months before his birth. He supposed contentment must also have bathed his mother in that time when she could rest a hand on her belly and she and her son could converse in code, tapping out musical notations in the blood.'