Isabel Rogers - Life, Death and Cellos

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

There are things I liked about Life, Death and Cellos, but overall I found it disappointing.

I was looking forward to this because classical music is a real interest of mine, and I’m pleased to say that the book’s real strength is the musical background. Isabel Rogers plainly knows a great deal about the music and about playing the cello, all of which she brings to life wonderfully – and I speak with all the authority of a dreadfully bad teenage cellist who hasn’t touched the instrument for many years. :o) I thoroughly enjoyed the passages dealing with the structure of various pieces, the technicalities of playing the cello, the workings and personalities of an orchestra and even the background history of Stradivari instruments. Sadly, the other aspects of the book didn’t work nearly so well for me.

Part of the problem for me is that the book isn’t the “mystery” it is billed as; it’s more sort of chick-lit-with-classical-music as we follow Erin, a twenty-something amateur cellist, through her relationship problems, her problems at work, discovering her talent as a cellist...you get the idea. Frankly, the story felt pretty stale and dull to me, it’s blindingly obvious where it’s heading from quite early on and it plods from one unlikely but entirely predictable event to the next as things fall inevitably into place. The dialogue creaks rather and Rogers is forever explaining the meaning of conversations rather than writing good enough dialogue simply to show it convincingly. We get far too many points of view from slightly thinly-painted characters (several of whom are wholly irrelevant and are just a distraction), the humour is often pretty clunky and there’s an awful lot of filler like this, as a character gets into the back seat of a car:

“‘Shift forward Erin,’ he said, as he tried to fit his knees into the car. ‘I have real men’s legs. They are longer than you think.’

Erin obligingly slid her seat forward and felt the car’s suspension dip as Charlie’s weight fell in.”

It’s just a bloke getting into a car, for heavens’ sake! Or a couple of pages of wholly irrelevant faffing about not looking at a mobile phone immediately before the sender of the crucial text walks in and imparts the news anyway. Wading through a lot of this stuff became a real trial.

So, despite the good musical aspects, I can’t recommend Life, Death and Cellos. It may be for others but it wasn’t for me.