Telegram: Unwritten Secrets: Reviews

'Written with Frame's typically precise and understated prose, it is a fine piece of storytelling that examines the nature of ambition and obsession, and looks at how art and society interweave.'
The Big Issue

'Prolific, versatile, capable of a William Trevor-like understated drama, Glaswegian Ronald Frame has published 14 works of fiction. Unwritten Secrets returns to the musical motifs, and the tangled teacher-pupil dynamics, of his Booker-longlisted The Lantern Bearers ( 1999). Its cleverly braided double narrative alternates the stories of two singers, bound by the time that the younger woman spent as a student of the elder. Frame evokes the sounds that makes these burdened lives worthwhile with deft and laconic skill: from Mariel singing an aria from La Traviata on a Paris bridge in a 'transfigured night', to the melancholy 'sweet balm of memory' audible in Ursule's recordings of her favourite Schubert songs. His novel strikes with flair and resonance those dissonant chords of money and desire, fame and politics, that rumble behind great music and its makers. Its various mysteries unfold at a presto gallop, free of all Viennese schmaltz, in a tight-knit, allusive and sardonic style: more Alban Berg than Richard Strauss.'
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'In German musical circles, unwritten secrets are tips for interpreting vocal scores that have been handed down through the ages from composer to singer and teacher to pupil. In Ronald Frame s new novel, it is these that the legendary soprano Sabine Hebbel imparts to her compatriot Ursule Kroll in the early 1930s and Kroll, in her turn, hands down to the young American, Mariel Baxter, over 40 years later. Frame is particularly adept at depicting the interplay between music, love and desire both lesbian and heterosexual and the price that all practitioners have to pay to perfect their art.'
Michael Ardetti, Financial Times