The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt (Fremantle Press 2013), the debut novel by Tracy Farr, is an incredibly detailed and exhaustive fictional biography that charts the course of the invention and rise to popularity of the original electronic musical instrument, the theremin, and its champion, Dame Lena Gaunt. The novel is set in two distinct times, and moves between them easily. It opens in 1991 with octogenarian Lena living a quiet life of isolation in Cottesloe Beach in Western Australia, with only her occasional heroin use and the memories of a lifetime for company. A filmmaker, Mo, wants to make a documentary of her life, and over the course of the book, Lena recalls her childhood and early life, her training as a musician, and as the title suggests, her loves. Threaded throughout these passages is a firsthand account of that life, moving from tropical Malacca and distant parents, to a lonely boarding school existence from the age of four in Perth, to Sydney and her affair with the artist Beatrix Carmichael, to fame and society life in European cities. Her love for music joins everything together, first the cello, and then the theremin, the only musical instrument played without touch or breath, but rather by the electrical impulses of the body, and forerunner to the techno-music of today. Lena’s star shines brightly at the height of her musical career, and it flares again momentarily at the beginning of the novel when she is invited to participate in an outdoor music festival (where she attracts the notice of Mo). But her life has been full of loss, and recounting her loves only serves to highlight that loss. Reading this book, it is difficult to believe it is fiction – the character of Lena seems so fully formed, so authentic, and her travels and aspirations and achievements and lovers so real, that she truly comes alive from the pages. The places she lived, the experiences she lived through – including wars and the Depression – seem to be an account from a diary rather than a novel. Farr is deliberately vague about some aspects of Lena’s life (the ever-present benevolent Uncle Valentine, for instance, is the one constant figure in her life, and yet we do not learn much about the intricacies of his life; and so it is with other relationships important to Lena – the snatches of detail we catch form an incomplete picture), and this is somewhat of a distraction as we are left to wonder about the hows and whys of some of the story’s major plot points. Once we accept, however, that we are not going to be told everything, and that there are some parts of the narrative that will be left to our imagination, it is easy to go with the flow of the book and immerse ourselves in what we know, while imagining all we don’t. All in all, the research this narrative entailed, the many details of time and place, along with the rich embroidering of the characters’ lives, make for a fascinating story.
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt – Tracy Farr
