The Metropolis Case: A Novel Review

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The Metropolis Case: A Novel ReviewThe Metropolis Case is an expert and frequently enchanting novel by first-time novelist Matthew Gallaway. It tells a story of epic sweep that bridges both the Old and New Worlds, three centuries, and the destinies of four characters who, besides having a profound engagement, whether as performer or aficionado, with Richard Wagner's epochal opera Tristan und Isolde, are also united by an unusual - and highly original - collusion of chance, fate, or luck. Thus it is in its own way a wily and suspenseful mystery, but one to which the actual solution is far less important than the path there. The attentive reader may be able to twist together the carefully laid strands before the official "reveal" (opera buffs will be clued in to some degree by the marvelously allusive title) but such is the author's masterful control of his art that every moment of revelation is handled with considerable and artful restraint, going further than the mere ticking off of a plot point, and leading the reader to consider ever more deeply the principal characters and their intertwining roles in the vast fabric of time and history and art.
Mr. Gallaway clearly has a special affinity for cities, likewise alluded to in the title of the novel. The novel's main locales - Paris, Vienna, Munich, suburban Pittsburgh, and most of all New York City (the novel is in part a valentine to that astounding metropolis) - are described in an alluring lack of over-specific detail all the better to enable their very different energies, moods, auras - the very taste of them - to filter through to the reader unhampered by any sense of being among tourist sites already well-digested by the culture. Instead: you are there.
It is, in fact, hard for me to think of a novel that I have read in which nature, classically considered, plays so sparing a part. And yet the touches of its presence that Mr. Gallaway bring into the world of his novel, in the forms of the growing appreciation of the vegetable world through the cultivation of a very urban garden and a touching subplot about the adoption of a stray cat, highlight them all the more.
Some might wish that some of the secondary characters, many of whom glimmer intriguingly in the background, might have been more fully developed, and a few might scorn some of the more jaw-dropping coincidences that make up the novel's plot, but these in no way damage the book's considerable magic, and are an integral part of how the novel works. It is in fact a grand fantasy on themes derived from Tristan and Isolde, especially in its main characters' search, sometimes anguished, sometimes amply rewarded, for love and "hoechste Lust" - supreme delight.
You absolutely don't need to be an opera lover or Wagner fan to appreciate this novel, or even have an acquaintance with the opera in question (though I'd urge you to go listen to it - it's great!). For most of all this novel is a tender, profound, impassioned, nuanced, and subtle answer to this question: What is art for? Like the answers to most of the deepest questions we ask ourselves, it is hardly reducible to a sound-byte. But the skillful form of the work, and the substantial pleasure of reading it, nevertheless vouchsafes to the thoughtful reader a haunting sense of having had a revelation that, even as it slips from your conscious efforts to grasp it, leaves behind its tantalizing essence: in short, the very reason that we seek to engage with art in the first place. Truly a book to savor word by word.The Metropolis Case: A Novel Overview

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