The Variations

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift – an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past.

‘Ecstasy is a word I’d happily associate with Patrick Langley’s lyrical and looping novel The Variations, a work with a similarly thrilling Nabokovian intrigue in the relationship between patterning, form and meaning…. The novel’s epigraph – “Variation is among the oldest and most basic devices in music. It originates in an inherent tendency to modify identical recurrence” – is a quote from the American composer Leon Stein, and almost laughably banal when held up against Langley’s humming prose. But its message is clear: it is Nabokov’s magic carpet, that age-old human impulse that – like music – wants to modify, edit, exceed, transcend itself. With The Variations, Langley appears to be weaving a carpet of his own.’
— Matthew Janney, Guardian

‘For all The Variations’ unusual elements, Langley handles traditional storytelling modes expertly. He can nail a character in a few lines…. He can do action. And he has a knack for ending chapters with the expertise of a theatrical director ramping up the tension and then — curtain! — dropping into silence. The Variations, in other words, is a book whose oddness stretches the reader without estranging us. It asks more questions than it answers, but provides plenty of delight to compensate. It’s a novel where, as Selda reflects, “something about the world is revealed, though she can’t say what it is”.’
— John Self, Financial Times

‘Langley’s grandly ambitious second novel … provides a vastly extended sense of family that stretches down the centuries into deep history…. Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children [is] a creation that can be placed in a line of weird invented institutions in which gifted adepts are gathered: see also Thomas Pynchon’s White Visitation in Gravity’s Rainbow, or David Foster Wallace’s Peoria REC in The Pale King…. [A] valiant attempt to find a narrative form both to reflect and transcend our remorselessly self-centred culture…. The Variations extends our sense of individuality.’
— Paul Quinn, Times Literary Supplement