The Music Wars

Blair Thompson was Adult Collections Co-ordinator at the North Vancouver District Library.

Set during the 1978 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Pape and Aspler’s novel concerns a young American violinist who becomes involved in a plot to spirit a fellow musician and dissident Soviet Jew out of the country before he can be arrested by the KGB.

While the dustjacket, with its hammer and sickle and barbed wine, might suggest that we are in Len Deighton or John Le Carré country, the dual concerns of The Music Wars are really the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union and the gradual realization by the young violinist that his single-minded pursuit of musical excellence has been at the expense of his humanity. Echoing Sydney Canton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, David Solomon, the protagonist, can almost be heard saying, “It is a far far better thing that I do than I have ever done,” as he prepares to switch identities with the dissident to facilitate the escape.

Considering the true-blue Canadian content of the authors (Pape was the publisher of Today magazine and Aspler was a CBC producer), one would have preferred perhaps a Canadian hero (the perils of Steven Staryk?). In some respects, The Music Wars is like all those CFDC-bankrolled films shot in Toronto or Vancouver, but with Old Glory flying in the background for the American movie-going market. This is a small cavil, however, as The Music Wars is quite involving, with an intriguing “twist” conclusion and fascinating characters. There is Yuri Volodin, the KGB officer, a master manipulator of men, who speaks English with an eastern American accent shot through with curiously outdated expressions from the 1950s. And Wayland Stone, an American journalist stationed in Moscow who, as a sideline, is writing a book on the history and politics of the Tchaikovsky Competition. Draft sections of Stone’s “book” pique the reader’s interest and, unfortunately, leave us hungering for more. There are revelations behind Vladimir Ashkenazy’s defection to the West, and Van Cliburn’s “victory” in 1958 which, the authors suggest, may have been rigged to serve the Soviet ends of Cold War diplomacy, surely an almost libelous (to Van Cliburn) contention.

Anti-Semitism is an instrument of national policy in Russia, according to the authors, and the problems of the Jews who cannot get exit visas for Israel (the “refuseniks”) get a good airing in The Music Wars. But the Jewish question is a conundrum for the Soviets as well; how could they open the floodgates of emigration to one group without prompting similar demands from other restless ethnic minorities in the “autonomous” republics? Moreover, can Russia afford to alienate its Arab friends in the Middle East by letting Soviet Jewry flock to Israel’s colours?

One measure of a good novel like The Music Wars may be that the reader receives a geo-political lesson and a page-turning Frederick Forsyth experience, at one and the same time. Recommended.