Review: August Blue by Deborah Levy

This breezy but potent novel begins in Athens, with concert pianist Elsa Anderson seeing a woman buy two mechanical, dancing horses. It’s the middle of the pandemic and Elsa is in hiding after a mid-performance crisis while playing Rachmaninov in Vienna that saw her walk off the stage. Shortly before the performance, in August, she died her hair blue, the titular detail that happens before the novel’s action but nonetheless pierces its weft like a needle. She’s in Athens to teach piano to a young student; later sections follow her return to London, a stay in France to teach a young woman, and to visit her ailing adopted father and mentor Arthur Goldstein in Sardinia.

But it’s the woman who buys the horses that Elsa becomes obsessed with, coming to converse with her in her head and seeing her everywhere. “We obviously wanted the same things,” Elsa says, “Perhaps she was a little more than I was”. She comes to understand the woman as her double; not identical or related, more aslant than that, but somehow entangled, like the relationship between a piece of music and its composer or the instrument that brings it to life. “I heard her voice as music, a mood, or sometimes a combination of two chords,” as Elsa tells it. August Blue then is a portrayal of a crisis of self, and the possibility and peril that comes with it. Narrative-wise it has a little in common with Tar or Killing Eve, but with neither of those stories’ open violence.

But to read a Deborah Levy novel for its plot, as intricate and carefully constructed as that might be, is to miss a lot of its point. Doublings begin to multiply in August Blue, among the characters but most notably in the text itself, like the ants that circle two different bathtubs, or the two minutes and 12 seconds during which Elsa went rogue on stage, a number that multiplies throughout August Blue like a prion. I couldn’t help reading it musically, the repeated phrases like themes and variations, but what a nervy, discomfiting composition it is. Take the moment Elsa believes she sees her double at a bakery in London:

Something was happening in the sky. Flocks of pigeons had landed on a rooftop above the bakery. And then they rose in a group above the chimney and flew together to another roof. They were not happy there either. No one noticed the distressed birds on the roof because they were looking ahead them. But she was looking upwards and I was looking at where she was looking.

I have a strong impression upon coming to the end, but am somewhat at a loss to describe what that impression is. August Blue may carefully expose the complicated obligations and responsibilities in caring relationships (parents and parent figures, mentors and mentees). It may comment astutely and profoundly on gender (an episode in which a young woman tells Elsa about the abuse she has suffered is achingly rendered). But August Blue is a above all a vibe.

It reminded me a lot of Ronnie Scott’s most recent novel Shirley, which similarly follows a young woman during the pandemic, and also investigates nonconventional caring. Like Shirley, the pervading atmosphere of August Blue is numbness, of conspiracy, of the world sliding off kilter, but not so radically that it is unrecognisable, merely uncanny. In other words, August Blue is Deborah Levy’s pandemic novel, and she masterfully evokes the rupture of meaning. That rupture may be frightening, but Levy also shows the possibility of remaking relationships, with work and friends, lovers and guardians.

Gay rating: 3/5 for a major queer character and relationships.