The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons

I read this novel recently following some sad news and it has been an easy comforting read. It is not a clever academic novel; much of it is predictable but it is carefully written and well researched. I found myself caring about the characters and what was to become of them as I quickly turned over the pages, travelling with the heroine, Elise, from Vienna to a country house in Dorset, shortly before outbreak of the Second World War.
There is a dream-like quality that embraces both emptiness and possibility as loss is explored in all its fullness.
Somewhere a clock ticks backwards and midnight is un-struck. Juliana plays and plays and it is every time at once. Burt is fishing in The Lugger on the Danube at dawn, and Mrs. Ellsworth and Hidegard bake a game pie together in the small kitchen of our old apartment.

Perhaps nothing is really lost; memories endure for those left behind. The accompanying Concerto in D minor for Viola, composed by Jeff Rona, expresses that beautifully in addition to these lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, 1590.
Nor is the earthe the lesse, or loseth aught.
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto another brought...
For there is nothing lost , but may be found if sought...

All that remained were the stone steps leading down to the lawns. The lawns themselves had reverted to meadow grass and weeds tore through the lavender and thyme borders. Then the sun slunk out from behind a cloud, casting a watery light across the valley and catching a treasure-hoard of golden daffodils and the red flash of a kite’s wing. The song of a Dorset warbler punctured the stillness, and in a shaft of pale sun I glimpsed clusters of buttery primrose speckling the path leading to Flower’s Barrow.