Sean Michaels is best known for his website Said the Gramophone, one of the original mp3 music blogs, a true pioneer of the digital age of music. If you’re at all familiar with Said the Gramophone then you’ll probably be aware that Michaels is also a pretty great writer. Not only did he start posting mp3s before anyone else, but he also writes about the music in a manner quite unlike anyone else, building a reputation for reviewing songs in the most lateral, creative ways possible, seemingly unrelated vignettes of prose and photography that nevertheless get at the heart of each song. He has also written for publications such as The Guardian, The Believer and McSweeney’s, so I guess it was just a matter of time before he tried his hand at something more substantial.
Us Conductors is Michaels’s first novel. Set in both Russia and New York in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the tale of Lev Sergeyevich Termen, a Russian scientist and inventor, who lived a rather extraordinary life. Just how closely Michaels sticks to the facts is left unclear (at least until an authors note which appears after the postscript), but I would advise anyone looking for a 100% historically accurate account of Termen’s story to look elsewhere (Michaels even points you to the definitive text). Not that Michaels is at all disingenuous about this fact, indeed the book opens with the note, “This book is mostly inventions,” although I suppose that in itself holds more than one truth.
Termen is most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the very first electronic musical instruments and probably the only instrument that requires no physical contact from its player. The sounds are created as the performer moves his or her hands near the instrument’s two antennae, creating a sound that is quite unlike that of anything else. As Michaels puts it:
“The sound of the theremin is simply pure electric current. It is the hymn of lightning as it hides in its cloud. The song never strains or falters; it persists, stays, keeps, lasts, lingers.”
The novel follows Termen’s rise from a promising young scientist at Petrograd University, to a Manhattan celebrity both in the worlds of science and entertainment. Its important to note that the image of the theremin was (understandably) very different in Termen’s day. While it is now best recognized as something from kitschly creepy Hollywood sci-fi (as well as the soundtrack to the UK’s most violent fictional county), at the time of its inception the instrument was seen as something bordering on the supernatural, these strange shrill sounds seemingly pulled directly from the ether. Listeners react in a multitude of ways. Some are amazed and delighted, while others are less than sure. Take for instance the passage in which Termen demonstrates the instrument to Charlie Chaplin:
But when the sounds started, DZEEEEOOOoo […] Charlie gasped so loudly that [RCA corporation salesman] Len turned off the machine […] Chaplin was as pale as chalk […] the actor was plainly terrified. The best-known phantom in the world, a man who had made his fortune as an illusion projected onto silver screens-he was scared of this box of ghosts
And Chaplin isn’t the only familiar face that Termen’s new-found fame brings him into contact with. He meets Glenn Miller and Gershwin, Ellington and Rachmaninoff, talks science with Rutherford and Einstein and even provides a demonstration for a certain revolutionary in his homeland. But to Termen all of these names pale in comparison to one person he meets in New York, the young violinist and eventual theremin virtuoso Clara Reisenberg, with whom he falls immediately in love. Much of the novel is written in the first person, as a letter from Lev in which Clara is often referred to as “you”, and the entire book (and indeed Termen’s entire life) is preoccupied with thoughts of this girl from Lithuania.
Termen is a budding young Russian exposed to the grand decadence and impossible promises of American life, a collision of innocent romantic ideals and solipsism born out of brilliance. Imagine a combination of Josef from Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and the all-too-human geniuses from Powers’s Gold Bug Variations and Galatea 2.2, men with intellect, with weaknesses, with the gift of ambition or the curse of obsession. That said, the reader’s sympathies lie with Termen throughout the book, his belief in the impractical and delicate forces of art and love proving naive yet noble in the face of the twin behemoths capitalism and communism.
And it is within the impractical and the delicate that the heart of the book lies. Faced with various systems of order, Termen gives himself to the spontaneous. The random, accidental nature of human connection and the wonder of unseeable, unconquerable forces, something his instrument embodies. The theremin is the perfect subject for Michaels, a man who sees magic in things, but perhaps not the obvious magic. Just like Michaels in his music reviews, Termen finds himself acting upon mystical forces rather than practical details, taking delight in the unexplainable, his knowledge of the component parts creating something that exceeds them in both scope and beauty.
The novel’s style mirrors this idea. Michaels’s prose is clipped and elegant, sentences like little staticky spits and sparks which both descriptively and structurally capture the electricity that lies at the heart of everything Termen does. The scientist’s persona is captured with the utmost subtlety, his sharp, original observations clearly those of a man who think outside the box. The style is a real winner, proving not only immensely readable but prone to moments of true beauty – discrete declarations, although simple when read alone, assembled into intricate, poetic passages, not unlike the components of Termen’s incredible machines. Take, for example, this piece in which Termen describes his incarceration on board a Soviet ship:
Some nights on the Starry Bolshevik, I can hear sounds from outside. I press my ear to the steel and beyond the groans of the ship, the screws loosening and tightening in the walls, I hear gulls. They cry and whistle. Other times I hear whales; I think they are whales; it is a moaning in four colours. My ear is pressed to the steel and I hear this calling like many callings folded together. Ancient blues, greys, scarlets, golds, on top of one another, in a chord. One day I will make a piano that plays the echoes of whales
It should be noted that Us Conductors is not all love and beauty and invention. The volatile politics of Termen’s homeland, alongside his position of influence in America, lure him into very dangerous territory. Business deals and visa arrangements are revealed to have multitudes of connotations as our plucky inventor is drawn into the fog of the dawning Cold War. The second part of the book spirals into nightmare as Termen is forced to endure what proves to be the polar equivalent of hell, and Michaels displays a gift for far more than pretty prose. But even the story’s darkest moments hold a flicker, jolts of pure inspiration, flares of that irrepressible electrical energy that drove Termen forward.
Us Conductors is out now on Bloomsbury here in the UK. Readers from the USA can get it courtesy of Tin House Books, and Canadians from Random House. The novel also won the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most lucrative literary award. It deserved it.
P.S. If you are in Scotland at the end of August, Michaels is crossing the pond to read and you should definitely go. Find the dates and links below, along with some Canadian events too.
Aug 22-23, 2015 • Edinburgh, Scotland – Edinburgh International Book Festival
Aug 25, 2015 • St Andrews, Scotland – Reading with Christopher Jory at Topping Bookshop
Sept 13, 2015 • Eden Mills, ON – Eden Mills Writers Festival
Oct 6, 2015 • Ottawa, ON – Read For The Cure
Oct 15, 2015 • Durham, ON – Free reading at Trent University (Durham campus)
Oct 15, 2015 • Peterborough, ON – Free reading at Trent University (Peterborough campus)
Oct 20, 2015 • Hudson, QC – StoryFest
Oct 23, 2015 • Edmonton, AB – LitFest Non-Fiction Festival
Oct 24, 2015 • St Albert, AB – STARfest Literary Festival