“Upward” is a word and movement – a direction – that gathers psychological and symbolic meaning through the novel.Įlsa is haunted by the past, including the men who have shaped her, Goldstein and Rachmaninoff. It contains the heat and desire of a European summer and yet its tone is blue, invoking melancholy, midnight, the expanse of sea and sky, the upward struggle of a soul. Like Rachmaninoff’s concerto, August Blue is set in a minor key. Their fragmented telepathic exchanges allow Elsa to hear and bring to light – to begin to compose – the nascent self who interrupted her performance of Rachmaninoff and caused her professional undoing.Ī therapist reckons with her own trauma, in the shadow of Australia's collective shame The woman begins to intrude on Elsa’s mind, prompting and finishing her unspoken thoughts. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. Elsa immediately senses the woman is her double: She and Elsa appear to be the same age and when Elsa first sees her they’re wearing almost identical raincoats. This woman will be the thread that strings together the fragments of Elsa’s life. It has been seized by the woman buying two horses. Sensitive Marcus is navigating a new pronoun and Aimee, raging from a past hurt and feeling unseen, is finding her voice.Įchoing her experience with Rachmaninoff – that moment she lost her concentration on a man’s composition – the amorous men who cross Elsa’s path are unable to hold her attention. Her brilliant career is on hold and she’s decided to give piano lessons instead, to 13-year-old Marcus on the Greek island of Poros in September and 16-year-old Aimee in Paris the following November. Reality is slowly being remade and Elsa, too, is being remade after apparently losing her nerve on stage just before a performance of her signature piece, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. Like the world around her, she is improvising through a time of rupture. It’s this whole professional self, with its enigmatic M-full-stop, and the soaring persona it denotes, that is up for grabs in August Blue.Įlsa has been untethered by a professional crisis in Vienna the previous August. Anderson is not in a trance when she plays, she is in flight. I had once heard him say to a journalist, No, Elsa M.

When we first learn her name, it’s her whole, professional name, spoken by her internationally renowned piano teacher, Arthur Goldstein: Anderson: statuesque, beautiful and unravelling. Life is slowly opening up in the aftermath of the pandemic it seems as protean and up for grabs as the protagonist herself. The world is a now-familiar present, with surgical masks, cancellations, lost jobs, parents working from home and intruding on their children’s lives. August Blue unfolds across a year from September to August as its narrator, an acclaimed classical pianist, drifts across a Europe emerging from lockdown.

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