Trumpet voluntary

BOOK REVIEW



Book Title: Trumpet voluntary

Author: Jeremy Harmer

Publisher/Year: Cambridge, 1999

Book Type: Adventure

Pages:111

SUMMARY:

This book deals with the story of a man whose loves bring him many different dangerous experiences. In this retrospective story, our main character called Derek, a viola musician, who remembers how his life has arrived to the point where he is at the moment, married with his best friend from the music academy, Rachel. He begins by recalling how he arrived to London to learn music many years ago, which was what he had been wondering for a long time. There, he met many different people who would be really important in his future. The most important events of this period of his life were his platonic love with a Polish girl named Malgosia who fell in love with an older music student who was really self-centred and the most popular student in the school, Tibor. Moreover while he was expecting for her he followed studying and playing in a quartet, where he met Rachel with whom he had just an affair between friends. They both wouldn’t like to follow with their relationship so they carried on being just friends. After the first summer holidays in the school Malgosia broke up with Tibor because he committed an unfaithfulness with her sister in her home in Poland while they were on holidays. Then Derek profits to win the heart of Malgosia and they got married after finishing the academy and they live together in London. Then it seemed that everything was perfect. But she began making many different trips to Scotland alone being assumed by him that she was there to relax herself. The truth was that she had been keeping in touch with Tibor because she still loved him. So she helped him by bringing a poison hidden in a trumpet box from Scotland to England.
One day she disappeared and Derek became crazy, but he discovered an e-mail from Tibor to his wife where he was asking her to bring the poison to Rio de Janeiro. Afterwards he was interrogated by the police about Malgosia and he decided to travel to Rio. In that moment he was helped by two friends who told him where Tibor and his wife were, so he found them and he was shooted when he tried to rescue her. When he recovered from that, he realized that he was lucky to be alive and that his wife had escaped and was poisoned and near to die. So he came back to Poland where he knew that Malgosia was but it was pointless because she finally died.
After that he was so sceptical that he decided to come back to England where he was arrested by the police because of his wife crimes. When he was near to be jailed, Rachel’s mother who is a lawyer helped him and police set him free. Afterwards he fell in love with Rachel and he decided to come back to Rio in order to discover the truth of Tibor. This was that Tibor was going to sell this poison weapon to someone. Moreover he had been playing with Malgosia and her sister during all those years and Malgosia had committed suicide by poison because Tibor had rejected her. So Derek became crazy and contributed in Tibor’s accident which killed him.
Then he came back to London with Rachel and both lived together. That’s the point where Derek begins recalling his story from.


Characters Description

• Dereck: He is a viola player and mad about love. Along the story we can prove how he feels a blind love to Malgosia and this is going deeply mark him. I mean the way his life develops is completely different that it had been if he hadn’t fallen in love with Malgosia. Although there are a lot of objections between him and Malgosia and she is never completely involved in their relationship, he isn’t worried about it and follows believing in their relationship. So that we can say that he is an ambitious person in love questions and he is self-confident at the same time. Moreover he has an special ability to persuade other people to help him but never under blackmail.
He is not a very well-known student during his music learning period although he can be really friendly for those people he gets on well with.
On the other hand he is reliable because he tries not to disappoint his friends. He has also a quite developed common sense during his usual life, but he can also drive mad when discovers his wife’s big lie.

• Malgosia: This young girl is Dereck’ s wife. She is the most beautiful girl in the School and because of whom everyone is madly in love with her. She is from Poland and she is studying in London. This shows his enterprising spirit which makes her improve everyday. We could also say that she is a perfectionist in every area in her life. In love terms she always feels something about Tibor, although his behaviour is not the best. From my point of view his relation with Dereck lies just in friendship and when she breaks up with Tibor she feels alone and our protagonist takes advantage of the situation. In fact between her and Dereck there is never a usual lovers relation.
His quite love disappointments make her so upset that she decides that committing suicide is the only solution.

• Tibor: He is the most popular guy in his the School. He is very famous between girls because of his appealing and his sense of humour. He is very rude with unknown people although he is neither friendly with his closer people. We can prove this by the way he cares Malgosia and many other loves he seduces. He is always lying her while their relation, and long time after this relation is finished he perceives bothering her. So we can say that he is selfish and monopolizing.

If we talk about the characters motivations that provide the basis of the story these are their music tastes that make them go learning to that school. There they meet each other and our main characters begin establishing many different kind of relationships that are going to perceive during and after the school-mate relations. So that we don’t know many things at all from the characters life before their school time, and we begin knowing about their different personalities by the way they behave between them.
Firstly we can notice that the main motivation for the characters for staying together with the past of time is love and friends relationships that our main characters have. Moreover we can also point out that music paper is also very important for characters motivations, but from my point of view it is not so important as the personal relations that they discover between them.Malgosia’s love is addressed to Tibor sometimes but also to Derek many other times. This changes favour appearing new love relations between Tibor and Malgosia’ s sister, Malgosia and Derek and at the end between Rachel and Dereck. In addition we can say that Malgosia is always feeling something about Tibor, and this lying relationship is going to change many things in our characters life.
In the other hand we can see how many different friendship relations are going to begin since they met in the Royal Academy Of Music. To sample this we can mention the music group which was composed of Carl Robins (a violinist), Rachel Merino ( a cellist), Matt Jenkins ( a violinist) and Derek.
Another motivation for the characters appear when Derek begins desperately trying to look for Malgosia because he keeps in touch with her family, a Cuban private detective, a Brazilian student, and an English teacher in Rio.

From my point of view this is captivating story that catch readers attention from the first page, and keeps this emotion until the end. When I began reading this I could not imagine how a music book could deal with so different genres like adventure, love, thriller, etc.
I strongly recommend this book because it made me think a lot about the two different kinds of love that appear throughout the pages. These are real and lying love. It is amazing to think how these similar but very different feelings at the same time, are able to change character’s life in different ways. The end is a little sad because I felt that it was strongly unfair that Tibor’ s wicked love killed Malgosia. However we can also point out how truly love succeed in Derek love story, because he is able to remake his private life through his old friend Rachel.
After analysing the sentimental part of the book, I also liked how the action part of the story is a consequence, and at the end it is not left any loose end.

If we concentrate on language and style we must say that the vocabulary is not very difficult because there are just few unfamiliar words (e.g. rehearsal) and most of them have to do with technical music words. We could establish that diction is standard because the author does not use many formal nor informal words. I would describe the language the author uses as an accurate and simple way of summing up an action which happens during many years. It does not contain any colloquialisms nor jargon because it is supposed that character’s cultural level is elevated. Moreover, he succeed at the point of beginning from near the end of the history as a perfect sample of retrospective. So the exiting of the book is spread from the beginning until the end.
The majority of words are a mixture of concrete and abstract. We can find many of them dealing with love and loneliness topics buy many others also refer to concrete nouns like researching or music topics.
The writer uses specific words referring to different places where the history takes place like Rio de Janeiro, London, Poland. He also uses temporal specific words in order to establish a chronology (‘the next day’, ‘four years before’).
The author favours several words with particular connotations in order to arouse positive responses to his feelings (‘crazy about music’) or also negative (‘there’s no need to talk to me like that’).
Sentences are usually long because of the difficulty of telling a so long story in a short way. In addition we can sometimes find out some syntax inverted sentences (‘from the rooftop terrace of my hotel, high up above the twenty-fifth floor, the view of Rio de Janeiro was breathtaking’).



By Rubén Tena