The Manuscript by Steven L. Wright
A newly married couple from Harrogate purchased a manuscript from an antiquarian bookseller titled, The Universal Language Isn’t Love or Music but Loneliness.
Completed in 1940 by unknown author, William Travers, it was one of several items offered at the estate auction of a local family. Reading and discussing the work changed their lives … and their marriage.
Waking in hospital Lieutenant William Travers learns the war’s over. The Armistice has been signed.
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Physically wounded and emotionally crippled, Travers shuns convention and, armed with an alto saxophone, turns his back on America to remain in Paris. He’s a jazzman at heart, so a jazzman he’ll remain. Throughout the Roaring ‘20s and Lean ‘30s, he encounters a bevy of characters: the artists of Montparnasse; the ladies at the Paris brothel; the curator at the Musee du Luxembourg; fellow band members in Paris; the stiff-collared Edwardians and the Bright Young Things who dance at London’s Savoy Hotel; the fiery Yorkshire sheep farmer who is half-American; the hard-bitten landlady in London; and, the owner of a Soho night club – the epicentre of everything considered illegal. On the eve of the Blitz in September 1940, he decided to perform one more gig.
A parallel narrative where the three protagonists, although separated by eighty years, confront the existential meaning of life.
My Review
Peter and Fiona have discovered a manuscript at the estate auction of a local family in Knaresborough. The author Lieutenant William Travers is unknown, but they begin to read together and their views are very different. Peter is somewhat obsessed, but Fiona fails to understand why. The story then continues with the contents of the manuscript.
I really adored Will. He’s a brilliant main protagonist in the story and we live his life through his eyes, from just after the First World War until 1940. Having been shot down in his aircraft, he was injured leaving him with mental trauma, back pain and one leg three inches shorter than the other. But he’s lucky – his friends all died.
Having no family left in America, he remains in Paris where life is much freer and he can earn a living playing his alto saxophone on the streets of Montparnasse. (He played in the house band of the Sinton Hotel before signing up to fly just as the Armistice was being signed.)
During his time in Paris he plays with the daring, modern jazz band Swaneeland from America, and in a brothel where the girls all have a sad story. Eventually, after a two year relationship with the enigmatic Veronique, he moves to London where he meets half American sheep farmer Helena Bolton-Leigh.
My only reservation is that we don’t know enough about Peter and Fiona to care about their relationship or the outcome. Fiona seems pretty horrid to me.
At one point, Will meets a woman who tells him that ‘The Universal Language Isn’t Love or Music but Loneliness‘, which becomes the title of the manuscript, but I disagree. The universal language is love and if it isn’t, it should be.
Many thanks to @ZooloosBT for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.
About the Author
Steve earned a BA and MA in history from the University of Cincinnati. After serving five years as a captain/attack helicopter pilot in the US Army’s 9th Infantry Division (1980-1985), he worked as a professional archivist and historian for twenty-five years. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed history journals in addition to three works of scholarly non-fiction including, Britain’s Battle to Go Modern: Confronting Architectural Modernisms, 1900-1925 published in 2018.
After relocating from London to the Yorkshire Dales National Park in 2014, he set himself a challenge: to write a work of fiction. His first attempt, Grey, Red, Blue … Gone was published in 2021. Steve enjoyed the process so he set his sights on a work of historical fiction hoping to incorporate his passion for history. The Manuscript is the culmination of years of research and writing concerning the period in Paris and London known as the Jazz Age. An era when syncopated music nursed by cocktails comforted the bored and disillusioned and propelled the Bright Young Things toward an uninhibited lifestyle unknown to earlier generations.
Since his early days in secondary school, Steve has been interested in the lives and published works of several notable writers of the 1920s to the early 1940s, from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Richard Aldington to Ernest Hemingway and W. Somerset Maugham. He believes their work helped define those unique and troubling decades.
He still lives in the Yorkshire Dales National Park with his wife, Suzanne, a studio potter, whom he met twenty years ago at a Chicago jazz club, and a three-year-old rescue cat named Vesper.
Book Links
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/234694686-the-manuscript
Purchase Link: https://mybook.to/manuscript-zbt
