The Music Room by William Fiennes

"House" is perhaps not the mot juste for a 700-year-old building with a gatehouse, a pike-and heron-haunted moat, a Great Hall, a Long Gallery, a Groined Passage and a private chapel. Fiennes, who never identifies the place (though the curious reader can do so in a mouse-click), uses the term interchangeably with "castle".

House or castle, it is a realm of ambiguity and shifting boundaries — a place that is not just a private sanctuary, as most family homes are, but open to the outside world which invades in bursts of antic activity: fêtes and festivals, concerts and films. Jane Seymour bends to sniff a rose; Richard Chamberlain kneels to fit a twinkling slipper; Morecambe and Wise arrive to shoot their Christmas show. "Hello! Are you married?" Eric Morecambe barks at the child William.

Behind the No Entry signs are other ambiguities. William is the youngest of five children. He knows his brother Thomas only from a photograph and fragmentary accounts of an accident — "a horse, a road, a car passing" — two years before his birth. Of his surviving siblings the eldest, Richard, is 11 years older than William and 18 months older than twins Martin and Susannah, who are almost absent from the narrative, away at school and later leading enviable, rackety London lives.

Richard, however, is a constant, turbulent presence. As a child he suffered from seizures. A neurologist reports "cerebral atrophy in the frontal lobes". Some of the time Richard lives in an institution, from which he returns for weekends and holidays. He supports Leeds United with obsessive fervour. He uses language in unusual ways: sometimes violently, at other times with delicate originality. He shares with William a love of herons. Arriving home for a visit he remarks that he loves the heronity of the moat.

At a certain point in his relationship with his brother it occurs to William that he is catching up. Richard is in his twenties, twice William's age, but: "I knew that my childhood was a temporary predicament; for Richard there was no country of self-determination on the horizon. His childlikeness was indefinite. He was moated in." A Latin motto painted on one of the castle walls reads: "There is no pleasure in the memory of the past." The line is a corrupt quotation from The Aeneid. Addressing his shipwrecked comrades, Aeneas tells them, "One day, even to remember this will give pleasure." Fiennes's narrative is finely poised between the consoling original and its darker corruption as he explores language and consciousness, memory and the sense of place; the passages of childhood recollection punctuated with accounts of how early neuroscientists moved, gropingly, towards a description of the enigma that is the brain.

Fiennes writes with well-disciplined lyricism, punctuated with startling imagery ("fish rise to the surface like souls of the dead"), strongly rooted in a pastoral tradition, with a sharp clarity of perception untainted by nostalgia.

He is a writer of intense originality: one longs to know what he will do next..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Our house was almost seven hundred years old ...William Fiennes spent his childhood in a magical place, a moated castle, the perfect environment for a child with a brimming imagination. It is a house alive with history, beauty and mystery, but the young boy growing up in it is equally in awe of his brother Richard. Eleven years older and a magnetic presence, Richard suffers from severe epilepsy. His energy influences the rhythms of the family and the house's internal life, and his story inspires a journey, interwoven with loving recollection, towards an understanding of the mind. This is a song of home, of an adored brother and of the miracle of consciousness. The chill of the 'dark historical spaces' coexists with the warmth and chatter of the family kitchen, and the surrounding landscapes are distinguished by ancient trees, secret haunts, the moat's depths and temptations. Bursting with tender detail, and combining humour, pathos and wisdom, "The Music Room" is a sensuous tribute to place, memory and the permanence of love.