The Music Room

July 27, 2009
Just after Fiennes (Snow Geese
) was born, his family moved into a medieval English estate that included a castle surrounded by a moat. The estate was an inheritance passed down from his father's ancestors since the 14th century. The castle in particular proves to be the book's most evocative metaphor for how every man is and is not an island. The book is part memoir, part journalistic profile and philosophical digression, all revolving around Richard, Fiennes eldest brother, who suffered from extreme epilepsy. In taut and exacting prose that profits grandly from vivid descriptions of the estate grounds and the working-class people who care for it, Fiennes recounts life alone in a home that was mostly only semiprivate. It was often used by TV and film crews as a backdrop. His older twin brother and sister went to boarding school while Richard “convalesced” in an insane asylum. Fiennes recalls the trials of familial love punctuated by a brother's violent seizures and outbursts (once scalding their mother's face with a hot cast-iron pan). His portrayal of Richard, moreover, is at once affectionate and brazenly honest. Fiennes allows him to come off as sick, magical yet somewhat boring (he talks incessantly about his favorite soccer team). The book feels fluffed up at times with asides on the history of epilepsy, but more often than not these serve the greater purpose of evoking a sense of continuity and reflection.

July 1, 2009
A scion of a venerable British family presents a chronicle of his afflicted brother and their unusual childhood home.

"Our house," writes Fiennes (The Snow Geese: A Story of Home, 2002),"was almost seven hundred years old." It was, in fact, the ancestral family castle, equipped with suits of armor, rusting halberds and flaking portraits of severe forebears. There was a gift shop in the stables and a broad moat where Fiennes swam and fished as a child. He climbed the roofs, bicycled in the Great Hall, explored the secret corridors of the attic Barracks and played in the King's Chamber. Care of the ancient house was important, but not as important as the care of the author's older brother, who was subject to severe epileptic seizures. Richard was also afflicted with frontal lobe brain damage, perhaps due to medications or the injuries received during severe tonic-clonic attacks. In addition to his graceful evocation of their stately Tudor home and his brother's experience with a debilitating illness, Fiennes writes elegantly about Mum on the viola in the music room and Dad on the bridge welcoming tourists and film crews. It's a verdant, elegiac recollection, sometimes suddenly shifting from one narrative state to another, leaping oddly—but fluidly—to the present tense from the past. Interspersed is a prcis of the history of research regarding his brother's status epilecticus.

An artful memory piece about a unique home life.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2009
British writer Fiennes grew up in a moated medieval castle inherited by his father. He spent his youth in a beautiful and highly imaginative environment, with tourists trooping through the public places while the family and staff maintained more private, cozier quarters. Three other siblings grew up and left the castle for lives in the city; but Fiennes brother, Richard11 years oldercirculated between an institution that treated epileptics and weekends and holidays at home. Richard joined Fiennes in tramping and maintaining the grounds with the family, venturing into favorite and private haunts, and helping to host public events to pay for the upkeep. Fiennes recalls the mysterious worlds of castle dwellers and epileptics, of family life lived in public and in intimate tension with asibling who was, at turns, tender and violent. Fiennes intersperses his recollections with scientific research on epilepsy in this beautifully written account of a fascinating childhood.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)