How many of you still haven't read Jessica's Rites of Spring? I pre-ordered my copy. I have never been so organised about anything in my life.

Read reviews and the first three pages here; my review's below.

You can read Rites of Spring as a tale of a family's breakdown under modern pressure. Its characters unfold intriguingly alongside a pacy plot and moments of real poetry. Yet it isn't their familiar shopping at Waitrose, holidaying in Greece, or strolling through Richmond Park that hold our attention. No aga-saga, this novel is about the problems facing the human spirit – not just those who make it in the end, but those who don't.

Like Duchen herself, jointly writer and musician, the novel spans the creative arts. Its various artists (sensitive and introspective as they are) illuminate the crucial focus on our souls. There is a world-famous concert pianist; a respectable music academic; a talented artist who is airbrushing porn to support his family; a once promising dancer who had to give it up when she got pregnant, but is none the less carving out a good career for herself as a cultural commentator. None of these characters lack talent or application - or even opportunity, middle-class as they are - but they enjoy different levels of success. Most poignant of all is thirteen year old Liffy, desparate to be a ballet dancer, but whose joints will never flex the right way to enter the profession.

Punctuating their stories is an unpredictable primal power, a force of nature, kind or unkind, and with the wild double terror and beauty of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It pulls us in unexpected directions, like Stravinsky's deliberately awkward ballerinas. Just as we cannot control, but are instead controlled by it, the novel's artists need luck, as well as talent and application, to realise their dreams.

Alongside the central significance of her title, Duchen's overwhelming question already springs out on the cover: “When does a free spirit become a lost soul?”. On fortune's wheel, the characters nonetheless have a choice: bitter self-destruction, or to live. Liffy has to choose self-control, or a giddy sense of purity, from the anorexia that threatens to kill her, or to accept the ballet career she'll never have “isn't the be all and end all, is it?”.

Choose Life, urged Irvin Welsh, but it isn't just junkies who find it impossible. Music, or any art form, is a mistress like Stravinsky's score: savage, frightening. glorious. We can grasp, usually, that successful artists put their real lives second, like the novel's ever travelling pianist Vladimir. We tend to forget the same agony faced by those with equal passion and without the luck. At its heart, the novel (indirectly, but powerfully) understands Benjamin Britten's sadly knowing: “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love.”

The Rite of Spring dances a girl to death, a sacrifice to please the God of Spring. Rites of Spring stops a girl dancing, in the end, so she can live, and brings the two characters who think mostly of nothing but music a child. The will to live, and the drive for life perpetually to renew itself, courses alongside the individuals disappointed along the way.

What we want defines our lives. Sometimes we get it, and sometimes not. Private sadnesses lurk in our shadows, part of reality. There is also something always turning towards the sun.

RITES OF SPRING (Review - Blue Badge Guide Post - February 2006)

In Jessica Duchen’s novel, out this month, London is more than a backdrop: it is silent witness to a quintessentially urban family breakdown.

Something is going drastically wrong with Adam and Sasha Levy’s home life in their rambling
house off the South Circular in East Sheen, a short walk from Richmond Park where Sunday
afternoons are spent with their daughter and twin boys.

In Waitrose shopping aisles and Queen’s Park sitting rooms, Jessica Duchen delicately observes the roots of family tension rumbling just below the surface of marriages in Tony Blair’s Britain. The Levys seem a familiar aspirational couple, steering a course between hectic, high-powered careers and successful family life. But Rites of Spring finds the Levys prey to the one thing they can’t cope with - a family death.

With the lightest touch of irony, Duchen traces each crack in the family’s structure as it appears - a concert at the Wigmore Hall, a musicians’ party in Hampstead, an abortive shopping expedition to Harrods, until the whole family slides into a vacuum pack of self absorbed individuals no longer able to communicate or comprehend each other in any situation. Not even mobile phone calls or messages ever seem to get through.

Daughter Olivia, “Liffy”, an uncomprehending thirteen year old and would-be ballerina, comes off worst in the dysfunctional world her parents have unwittingly created. Via her musicologist aunt’s specialist interest in Stravinsky, spooky folklore tales filter into the spaces in her heart and mind vacated by her parents’ virtual withdrawal of care. Duchen pitches us into Adam and Sasha’s hapless mid-life paths of self-discovery, while they fail to recognise that their beloved daughter has embarked on a journey through her own rite of bodily self-sacrifice.

Jessica Duchen’s name may be known to the music-loving Blue Badge Guide contingent as a regular contributor to the Independent and BBC Music Magazine. She has previously published
biographies of composers Gabriel Faure and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. But this book, her first foray into fiction, has already been rewarded by a two-book deal with Hodder and Stoughton.