Frozen Music

by Francis King

product_description

104 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Francis Henry King, CBE, was a British novelist, poet and short story writer.

He was born in Adelboden, Switzerland, brought up in India and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and left Oxford to work on the land. After completing his degree in 1949 he worked for the British Council; he was posted around Europe, and then in Kyoto. He resigned to write full time in 1964.

He was a past winner of the W. Somerset Maugham Prize for his novel The Dividing Stream (1951) and also won the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize. A President Emeritus of International PEN and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he was appointed an Officer (OBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1979 and a Commander of the Order (CBE) in 1985.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

# 10 in my deep dive of the novels of King, his 20th published work.

Honestly, as I finish each of King's works, I think - well, that was the best one yet - only to find the next one just as compelling and well-written. Although this is billed as a novella, and, at a mere 144 pages, is a mite shorter than his other books, it packs just as much of a wallop, and has just as much detail and complexity as his longer works - and on a sentence-by-sentence basis, no one writes better prose.

Drawing on his own childhood in India, where he lived till sent to the UK at 9 for schooling, King's portrait of the country is just as spot-on as his characterizations of both native and foreign inhabitants. I was never quite sure just where the story was heading, and although the careful plotting is perhaps not as shocking or unexpected as in other of his works, it still made an emotional and satisfying impact.

[John Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

A re-visiting of old haunts in India by father, son and father’s young and newly wed wife. For some very strange reason my weirdly wired brain cast Jack Whitelaw, the actor and comedian, along with his father, as the father and son in this novel. (NB ‘Travels with My Father’, the comedy series). As any reader of the book will soon find out, such a casting is pretty much off beam. Philip, the father in the novel, whilst set in his ways, totally lacks the blimpish characteristics of JW’s Dad. And the son, Rupert, does not, fundamentally, share Jack W’s persona, as will soon become glaringly obvious to any potential reader.

Philip and Rupert appear to be strangers, emotionally. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, though the death of Rupert’s mother and Philip’s first wife, rather than bonding the two men together in a shared grief, has kept them apart.

I found the book rather disturbing, certainly Oedipal, and I apologise unreservedly to Jack Whitehall. Rupert sucks!

Anglo-Indian relationships are interestingly portrayed and no doubt draw on King’s autobiographical experiences.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Francis King's new novel, the first since his much acclaimed 'Voices in an Empty Room', returns to India, scene of his own childhood and the landscape of his best selling 'Act of Darkness'. The emotional landscape will also be familiar to Francis King's readers; it is a story with a devastating but inevitable ending, arising out of the deep yet often tentative and unspoken feelings of his characters.

"Julian, recently divorced, returns to his childhood home with his father and his father's new wife, a Finnish girl closer in age to himself. The India they visit and the India they each separately recall are distinct, yet the images merge subtly, in ways which themselves point to a past mystery. It is a mystery which may yet be reenacted in the present.

"This is writing of a particularly high order, in which dark themes of things done and undone are illuminated against the vivid backcloth of India and shown finally in quite different human perspective." From the jacket flyleaf of the 1987 hardback edition from Hutchinson.

I have quoted the above not simply because the GR synopsis is so poor but because it saves me from attempting a precis of the novel without having to make use of spoilers. The most important thing I want to say, and I have said it before, is what marvellous writer Francis King was. It is extraordinary that this author, born in 1923 (he died in 2011) and published his first novel in 1946 (and the last in 2009) wrote novels that defy categorization and remain readable long after the world and circumstances they are set in have vanished. He may not be a writer, yet, of the canonical stature of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens but like them his novels are not trapped in a 'historical' period because they deal with emotions and characters that are utterly identifiable.

I can't help mentioning how good he is at presenting the confusions of children faced with the well intentioned but ultimately harmful deceits adults use to 'protect' children.

This is a beautiful novel? novella? long short story? It doesn't matter it is a wonderful portrayal of the dynamics of family and ib particular the love of fathers and sons. I don't want to say more. If you have read nothing by Francis King start here, copies of his books are (in 2025) ridiculously cheap and plentifully available.

One final point for younger readers (i.e. particularly those born since the millennium) this is a novel about the British in India, it is a novel about India but it is about the India of the Indian empire. It does not pretend to be about India of the Indian people.

[Andrea Neves António · Rating 4 out of 5]

Uma história de visita ao passado, quando Rupert, seu pai Philip e sua madrasta finlandesa Kristin regressam à Índia, 20 anos após a morte da sua mãe, lá enterrada.
As memórias das pessoas e dos locais, tantos anos depois, irão ter outro significado.
Os locais e as pessoas, assim como o quotidiano, temperam este romance nostálgico, onde muitas palavras não ditas são pressentidas e onde. ternura tem também o seu lugar, especialmente no final.

[Linda Gaines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story of a son and his father and their trip to the past.