Elsa Anderson, orphan, ex-prodigy and popular piano virtuoso, recently dyed her hair blue on a whim, then lost her nerve and walked off stage during a recital of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in Vienna. Now she’s travelling across Europe, teaching piano, while she tries to understand why. Her hands are still insured for millions of dollars: before she walked off stage, they played two minutes and 12 seconds of a composition of her own. Now, in Athens, adrift and dissociated, self-image in ruins, she watches a woman buy the last two cheap toys at a flea market stall. The toys are mechanical dancing horses; the woman is herself.
Deborah Levy’s ninth novel flickers constantly between comedy and darkness. Her prose is as quick and bare as ever, her manner excitingly abrupt. By page six she has set out her stall: the story is to be about how you construct yourself, and how that will always be a reconstruction. Elsa and her double are to be aware of one another from the outset, and in a sense their very doubledness will cancel – or at least unravel the idea of – what we might call identity. “My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more me than I was.”
Elsa wants the mechanical horses for herself. When she finds she can’t have them, she steals her double’s hat. The mutual chase that ensues takes them to Paris under the sign of Covid, then London, then Paris again and then Sardinia, where she confronts Arthur Goldstein, her long-term musical mentor and adoptive father – “a short man. With complexes” – and the Trilby motif cued by the hat reveals itself to be rather more complex than the reader expected. All her destinations are nodes of a sensibility as well as scenes of a drama: they describe appetites, and a richly experiential way of understanding life. Elsa dives for sea urchins then eats their insides, “slimy, salty and intense”. Millefeuille pastries, it turns out, are so called because “the baker had sex on a thousand leaves in the dark forest of Fontainebleau”.
Meanwhile, on Green Lanes in London the mystery twin wears her hair in a net set with red pearls, and in Paris at the Café de Flore, throws her half-smoked cigar into Elsa’s drink before running away. Who’s real and who is not? Neither. Both. They’re a dialogue pursued inside each other’s heads, a mutual analysis of how long Elsa’s breakdown has taken to develop, how slow-burning were the resentments and confusions that led to it. The central mystery of that story lies in the pianist’s relationship to her mentor. Who was she, in the administrative sense, when she was given up to Arthur Goldstein for adoption at the age of six? Who was her mother? Goldstein would like to tell her, but he can’t face it. Instead he’s dying quietly in Sardinia. “Send me your sanitised hands,” he texts her, “so I can hold them against my old heart.” He’s desperate to have Elsa – his “legacy” – retrieve her genius and play for him one more time. Just as long as it’s not something she’s composed herself, because creativity is not what he schooled her for. While Elsa and Elsa drive the narrative, it’s Arthur and the adoption papers that drive the plot, revealing eventually the nature of the psychic adventure to which doubling is the key.
A doppelganger taunts us not so much with our mirror image as with the very idea of knowing ourselves, and how we come by it. It stands us off from ourselves in a different way from the mirror. By revealing something the mirror can’t, it forces us to admit that, in some devastating way, we’re actually here. We exist. The double makes us uncomfortable because it has been fractioned off without permission. But of course, you are also by definition your double’s double – and by acknowledging this, Deborah Levy subtly decentralises her central character. There is such intensity, such innate mania and gothic rage in that.
Doubling also serves Levy’s characteristic urge to mischief, her playfulness with symbol, connection and allusion. In flight across Europe, Elsa mimics the despair of Rachmaninov after the failure not of his Second Piano Concerto but his first. Various pianos stand in for one another, and always stand for something other than themselves. Though life strains to be pure experience, no sea urchin or delicious almond biscuit, no Perrier mixed with mint syrup at the Café de Flore, represents only itself. The mechanical horses are a memory, guilt is wrapped in mysterious joy, joy in forgotten guilt. Which of us is the instrument, Elsa is compelled to ask, the piano or the pianist? Everything is a metaphor for something else, a clue to some other event, and that’s what makes this such a gleeful read. You know you’ve picked up only a fraction of what Levy has left for you to find; you know you’ll read August Blue again. At the same time, you’re forced to concede that once again she’s also made you feel more, perhaps, than you wanted. Emotionally, she’s opened you up as skilfully as she would open an item of seafood.
• August Blue by Deborah Levy is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
