Ravel, Vaughan Williams, and the Question of Whether Music Can Hold a Nation's Soul

Jonathan Coe fictionalises the unlikely Paris friendship between two composers who became emblems of their nations. The result is a novel about identity, war, and what music costs when countries claim it.

The historical record gives Coe almost everything: in 1907, Ralph Vaughan Williams arrived in Paris lumpy with Teutonic counterpoint and left three months later with something looser, lighter, and irreducibly English. His teacher was Maurice Ravel — tiny, precise, obsessed with mechanical toys — who was baffled by his pupil's fixation on folk music but seems to have grasped, before Vaughan Williams did, what it was for. That the two men became genuine friends across a chasm of temperament and nationality is the kind of coincidence that fiction has to earn; here it's the foundation. Coe's structural solution is elegant. He invents Pierre 'Mylo' Mylonas — a fictionalised Calvocoressi, the actual go-between — and frames the novel as Mylo's posthumously discovered memoir. This gives Coe a narrator who is constitutionally homeless: Portuguese father, Greek mother, shuttling between London and Paris, fluent in several languages and native to none. Mylo watches the Ravel-Vaughan Williams friendship from outside both national identities, which means he can describe what national identity looks and sounds like without being captured by it. The novel's formal conceit — Coe calls it a fantasia — is not decorative. The book shifts tempo and register the way a piece of music modulates: a slapstick vignette about moving a piano (genuinely Keatonesque in its physical precision) sits next to a quietly devastating section in which another pupil's London diary is interrupted by Mylo's increasingly agitated marginal corrections. Coe has written about Englishness his whole career, in novels from What a Carve Up! through The Rotters' Club, but this is the first time the question feels philosophical rather than satirical. He wants to know what it means for music — or a person, or a country — to become itself. The World War One section is where the novel's argument sharpens and hurts. Ravel went to the trenches; Vaughan Williams drove ambulances. They fought the same enemy and never quite found each other again afterward. Coe doesn't editorialize — the friendship simply contracts, the correspondence thins, and the reader feels the borders harden. The 1943 premiere of Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony at the Proms arrives in the final pages as a kind of answer to the book's opening question — can music represent the soul of a nation? — but Coe is too honest to let the answer be simple. The symphony is a beacon, a consolation, an expression of something deep and shared. It is also, by that point in the novel, a complicated artifact made by a man who was changed, estranged, and not entirely recovered. The book's honest limitation is Ravel himself. Mylo's devotion to him is the novel's emotional engine, but Ravel remains somewhat sealed — observed from outside, admired, slightly worshipped. We understand what Ravel did for Vaughan Williams's music more clearly than we understand what Vaughan Williams did for Ravel's inner life. This asymmetry is probably faithful to the historical record, but it means the friendship's full reciprocity never quite lands. What we get instead is a beautifully rendered portrait of Mylo's one-sided love for a man who was, by all accounts, genuinely difficult to know.