Rose Tremain’s latest is music to the eyes

FICTION; The Gustav Sonata; By Rose Tremain; Chatto & Windus, €17.50

The musical sonata, classically, has three parts. The first introduces the theme, the second offers a tonal contrast to the first, and the third recapitulates what has gone before.

With typical ingenuity, Rose Tremain has borrowed this structure for her 14th novel, which is divided into three tonally distinct sections. In the hands of a less masterly writer, this sort of architectonic ...