Stunning and difficult, Stella Goldman is programmed for maximum nuisance capacity, but when she discovers both her father's affair and her boyfriend's infidelity on the same day, she flees into the arms of kindly Pen, who speaks as though he's stepped out of Brief Encounter.
Meanwhile, her friend Ellen struggles to come to terms with the death of her sister, Lydia, whose ghost haunts not only her and her father Roland, but the beloved Goldmans (from Brother of the More Famous Jack), too. Along with eccentric professors, wicked monks, and the titular travelling hornplayer, their lives collide in a breathtaking finale.
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In Trapido's world all is not what it seems, to put it mildly. She is a gifted comic writer because she knows tragedy is just around every corner. Since 1982 and the publication of her Whitbread-winning novel, Brother of the More Famous Jack, her buoyant, allusive roundelays have proved that she has a knack for the ways gifted families work--and the ways they most definitely do not. She is also a brilliant commingler of life and art. Her third novel, Temples of Delight, is an inventive riff on The Magic Flute, while her fourth, Juggling (inexplicably, never published in the U.S.), sets forth a key Trapidian tenet, the superiority of Shakespearean comedy over tragedy: "Survival is admirable. It is more difficult than death, since it takes more energy and guile." The Travelling Hornplayer seems to have been inspired by both Conrad's Heart of Darkness and William Müller's lyrics, "which Schubert, under the cloud of his own recently diagnosed syphilis, managed so brilliantly to layer and elevate into a profound, bombarding symbiosis of love and death." This tantalizing novel is no less layered--though, given her comic genius, elevation isn't exactly Barbara Trapido's style. --Kerry Fried
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