Turning the pages with ANDY: Us Conductors

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Of the writers nominated for the 2014 Giller Prize, Sean Michaels couldn’t have been a more deserving recipient. The Scottish-born Montreal resident won Canada’s most esteemed literary honour in November 2014 for his stunning first foray into fiction, Us Conductors.

Music aficionados will remember Michaels as the creator of Said The Gramophone, a music blog that originated in 2003 that was one of the first in the world to begin posting mp3’s. Widely known as an artist-friendly blog, the site removes mp3 links within a few weeks of posting, but Michaels’ first literary effort will endure a tad more longevity thanks to both the exposure warranted by an award whose winner gets $100,000, and to the astounding strength of his novel.

For his book’s subject, Michaels chooses Lev Sergeyevich Termen. The latter was a famous Russian scientist whose fame endures to this day for both what he achieved with his scientific experimentation, and for how he served as a covert state spy during his time in America.

Termen’s most famous invention, the theremin, takes the American stylization of his last name as its moniker. It is one of the most renowned early electronic musical instruments, partly due to the fact that it is operated without physical contact, and in its lack of a tether, is notoriously difficult to play. Its sound is ghostly, and has appeared prominently in many movies in the mid 20th century who used its eeriness to heighten suspense and raise goosebumps.

Us Conductors takes the form of a retrospective letter encompassing Termen’s life written in the hopes that it will find Clara Rockmore, his unrequited love interest. While Teremin’s life is already worth a Wikipedia perusal, Michaels’ fictionalized account lends the Russian’s life a Gatsby-esque allure. With Teremin already known for inventions, Michaels’ own fictional inventions render him a more polarizing figure that inspires compassion and annoyance in equal parts.

The novel picks up as Termen is being shipped back to Russia after a lengthy stay in New York. His tone is mournful as he bemoans the distance, both physical and emotional, that grows increasingly wider for every word he writes while locked in his cabin. The story then flashes back to his youth, as a way to give readers context and to spare them the morose struggles that await Termen on his return to a post-revolution Russia in 1938.

As a matter of personal preference, Termen pre-infatuation with Clara Rockmore is a decidedly more likeable figure than the whiney Termen who greets us on his return to his motherland. As a fresh-faced student at Petrograd University, Termen cuts a normal figure. Amongst the brilliant researchers there, his friend Sasha included, he does not feel his achievements measure up, but the state has other ideas. In their hopes to modernize Russia’s vast rural population, the Bolsheviks see electricity as a unifying force, and Termen’s ethereal instrument poses an attractive introduction to the wonders it could achieve.

Lenin himself encourages Termen to not let his tours of the instrument be confined to Europe. Termen is soon bundled up and sent to New York with his instrument and ambition in tow.

His arrival to Manhattan is greeted with all the flair a celebrity scientist could hope for, but his Soviet handler, Pash, brings a halt to the reverie when he notices an American federal agent observing proceedings from afar with binoculars.

We quickly forget that Termen is being watched as he enjoys a dizzying spell of success in Roaring Twenties Manhattan, entertaining a mix of corporate heavyweights, creatives, scientists, and students in his studio, where he both works and conducts classes for prospective thereminists.

While enjoying his time whirling about the city, Termen grows increasingly uncomfortable. Encouraged by Pash to build prototype new devices that will lead to contracts with American corporations, Termen realizes he is a scapegoat in a ploy to obtain classified information to send back to Soviet Russia. In his hawking of his instrument, Teremen himself becomes an instrument of the country he loves so much.

As Termen becomes deeply embroiled in his feelings for a young student named Clara Rockmore, so too does he become further engrained in clandestine plots. His involvement reaches the extent that he is scheduling meetings in buildings only as to gain access to documents that they hold. After one of these episodes, Termen is forced to kill the very agent he saw upon his arrival to America with some of the kung-fu skills he has conveniently picked up.

Now with blood on his talented hands, Termen is forced to constantly be vigilant. He remains in the U.S. for a few more years before things collapse and he is whisked off to a Russia that has changed completely in his absence. Virtually penniless and living with a relative, Termen seeks the audience of an extremely high-ranking official in a bid to obtain a research position within the government but bungles his appointment after mentioning his stint in America.

As he lies in bed that night, Termen is whisked away to a gulag where he serves time as a political prisoner for no apparent reason. In its dark tone, this portion of the novel is reminiscent of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a tale of a communist revolutionary tried by the same government he had enabled into power.

Throughout the remainder of the story, Michaels’ imaginative prose continues to weave a spellbinding narrative whose musicality keeps one fully entranced. I for one will be waiting with bated breath for his next novel.

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