All is Song
by Samantha Harvey
(£16.99, Vintage)
Samantha Harvey is an audacious writer. The subject of her Booker longlisted debut novel, The Wilderness, was dementia; in her second, All is Song, she looks at the role of philosophy in ordinary life. If that sounds tedious, it isn't: All is Song is as much about family relationships as it is a novel of ideas.
At its centre are the wealthy, fiftysomething brothers Leonard and William. The pair reunite in London after the death of their father; Leonard having played the dutiful son, taking a sabbatical to care for him, William the absentee.
Dumped by his girlfriend, Leonard is forced to move in with William and his family. The pair struggle to rebuild their fraternal relationship, not knowing "how to negotiate the extremes of one another".
William is certainly a man marked by extremes. A former university lecturer in ethics, he has retained a following of students after his departure. Harvey, inspired by her philosophy degree, has made William's life echo that of the Athenian thinker Socrates: William has won guru status among his followers, favours lecturing over writing and served in the military.
But it is in his methods of reasoning that William most closely resembles Socrates, his awareness of his own ignorance and his never-ending questioning - as Leonard says, he is "like a child asking Why? Why? Why?". William impresses and frustrates equally, a man who "swim[s] against the stream" but whose unwillingness to budge from his principles eventually tips his family into crisis.
It is a novel with little drama - the reader is a confused onlooker at the most significant event - but its small cast is compelling. Harvey's talent is in the details of both characters and relationships that seem trivial but are telling: the joy Leonard feels when his possessions are reduced to the minimum, his loathing of the way tomato makes bread soggy, or William plaiting his wife Kathy's hair every day - an action which hints at intimacy in a marriage which otherwise seems cold.
Harvey is a master of language, adept at both Wildean one-liners (William says of his sons: "I think everything of education, which is why I'm sad that they go to school and never get any") and more profound expression: "For all that one's family could irritate and infuriate, their mirrored genes and minds of shared memories broke down every defence. There they were, and things were perfectly simple."
All is Song also serves as an introduction to philosophy - especially ethics and philosophy of religion - although I suspect some readers will tire of the brothers' lengthy debates. "We all suffer at times from the tiny mind," declares William during one such mental tussle. On the strength of All is Song, I would say Harvey may be an exception.
