In Orpheus Ann Wroe has written the biography of a mythic figure the book is dedicated "to everyone who protested, 'But Orpheus isn't real'" and a meditation on the melody art plays at the deepest levels of life. Her immediate inspiration is the extraordinary sequence of sonnets that Rilke wrote, or transcribed at Orpheus's dictation, as he thought it, in a space of weeks at the beginning of 1922. Indeed, Wroe's Orpheus might be seen as an attempt to emulate in glowing, rhapsodic prose the arc of Rilke's transcendent poetic achievement.
The book opens on the morning of 2 February 1922, with Rilke entering his study in the little square tower of Muzot in the Valais in Switzerland, where the poet spent his last years. He was in the process of completing the Duino Elegies, the masterwork he had been engaged in since 1912. Now, suddenly, this winter morning at his standing-desk he felt himself set on by the very spirit of poetry, and there began to pour out of him, not another of the elegies, as he had expected, but a sonnet, ready-made, so it seemed, the rhythms and rhymes already in place:
Da stieg ein Baum. O reiner Übersteigung!
O Orpheus singt! . . .
(A tree rises there. O pure exceeding! Oh Orpheus sings!)
Before the month was ended he had completed the cycle of 55 sonnets; as he wrote later to a friend: "They are perhaps the most mysterious, most enigmatic, dictation I have ever endured and performed." It was a remarkable example of literary inspiration a vindication, in fact, of the very notion of inspiration, a thing the world had come to doubt in the prosaic years after the first world war. Rilke, and the Orphic spirit that found utterance in him, was here to affirm the continuing power of poetry to move, uplift and sustain. As he wrote elsewhere, Gesang ist Dasein: song is existence.
A caveat. Anyone expecting from Wroe's book a straightforward history of the Orpheus legend will be disappointed. Certainly it is a work of scholarship, but scholarship as practised by a rhapsode. In tackling her subject the author seemingly has traced and read every available source, ancient and modern, including those works attributed to Orpheus himself, such as "The Argonautica", the Book of Orphic hymns, and the Lithica, a treatise on the magical properties of stones. She has travelled to Orpheus's supposed birthplace, Gela in Bulgaria, the Thrace of old, where at a musical evening in a local hotel she spots a reincarnation of her hero in a "small, tow-headed boy of five or six" who "moves with extraordinary grace, on tiptoe, twirling around each obstacle . . . singing". There are other sightings, in unlikely places: a London Underground station; the beach at Atlantic City; Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphée in which the god-like singer travels by taxi and enters Hades through a mirror; Jean Anouilh's play Eurydice, set in a railway café in the middle of the second world war.
Wroe does give us the essential facts, if in the circumstances we may speak of fact. Orpheus's origins are lost, she tells us. "In the beginning he was perhaps a vegetation god, a deity of growth, death and resurrection. Hence "Orpheus", by one derivation: dark, obscure, out of the earth. But godhead gradually slipped away from him, leaving only a sense of election and the power, through his music, to change landscapes, seasons, hearts." We first encounter him by name in the sixth century BC, but his image, identified by his lyre and the charmed birds about his head, had appeared on vases and plaques long before that.
His mother was Calliope "fair-voice" the muse of epic poetry. In some versions his father is the sun-god Apollo, in others it is Morpheus, the god of sleep and dreams. More mundanely, he is said to be the son of Oeagros, an uncouth king of ancient Thrace, ruler of the Odrysians and the Bistonians, who "lived in one-room huts or chambers underground, the walls lined with clay or wolf-skins". Wroe seems to favour Orpheus in this earthly, earthy, version. She sees him in something very like the traditional manifestation of the poet: unemphatic, vulnerable, fleet of foot and pale of gaze, a wonder-worker somewhat in awe of his own powers. "He realised very young what music could do. It could capture wild creatures as deftly as his hunter-father, but without spears, or snares, or blood." She knows his tastes, his desires and reprehensions "beans he abominates" and follows his progress, his growth in years and learning, with an almost maternal eye. She knows his waywardness, too, assuring us, with a mother's rueful astringency, that "his taboos seem as capricious as a teenager's" and in the acknowledgements at the back of the book we note the author thanking her "eldest son Simon, for introducing me to Rilke's poetry in the beginning". Throughout, Orpheus is suffused with Calliopean care, attentiveness and pride.
The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter representing a "string" of Orpheus's lyre. The "Fifth string: Death" shows the author at her most powerful and poetical. She seems to agree with medieval theologians in seeing Orpheus's wife Eurydice as his own "lower self", and also, perhaps, as death; in Cocteau's Orphée, she tells us, "Orpheus had gone down to Hell to find her, his own Death, as much as to retrieve his wife." That phlegmatic savant Maurice Blanchot enters a more ambiguous, darker plea, seeing in the quest to the Underworld an attempt by Orpheus not only to rescue Eurydice, representing truth or art, but also, as Wroe writes, "to look at her in 'the other night', as the still-unattained object of his desire". A true case, then, of cherchez la femme.
Wroe conceives of Orpheus not only as a creator of magical song, but as the maker of an entire theogony, conjuring gods out of the spirit of music: "All his goddesses were versions and virtues of the great Mother, all his gods were aspects of the creating and destroying power, and all these resolved to One: light, life, Love." Subtly, too, she suggests how Orpheus in his various aspects embodies a manifold of deities, from Dionysus to Jesus, although she observes wryly that while some said he knew how to make a man walk on water "he never dealt in miracles of that sort."
Orpheus: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate. There are passages in it where one will feel lost in the author's elusive wake, and seem to be stumbling blindly through the golden dust of an Attic glade, yet the music is always captivating. For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical diligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia. This is a new kind of writing, the kind one encounters in Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, in Claudio Magris's Danube, in Pietro Citati's marvellous studies of Goethe, Tolstoy, Kafka. Her Orpheus sings on at the very heart of our culture, roaming western civilisation "much as balladeers, hurdy-gurdy men, pipers and storytellers used to travel the back roads of America and Europe . . . He has no certain roots, but keeps returning, as if he has something urgent to transmit to us."
John Banville's The Infinities is published by Picador. To order Orpheus: The Song of Life for £14.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
