Books: Mind the Music & the Step

A BATON FOR THE CONDUCTOR (219 pp.)—T. L W. Hubbard—Houghfon Mifflin ($3). ]”You see,” the young man told the psychiatrist, “[my uncle] began as Sir Henry Wood. Then he passed through a Beecham phase, a Boult phase and a Sargent phase . . . After that [he] began adding new tricks with each conductor he studied.”

“What is your uncle’s style now?”

“[It creates] the sort of sensation that goes from the nape of your neck to the base of your spine when Yehudi Menuhin reaches the theme in the Bartok concerto. You know what I mean.”

Uncle George, in his normal moments, was the Ministry of Education’s chief troubleshooter; e.g., when scores of moppets were hospitalized after eating a contaminated school lunch, Uncle George was called on to calm the troubled waters. But now Uncle George needed calming. A growing passion for music had developed, first, into the mild eccentricity of barking and screaming like a normal conductor. This whim had so worsened that now, night after night, Civil Servant George “conducted” whole orchestras on his phonograph, laid grandiose plans for philharmonic “festivals,” hired and fired entire woodwind sections. He also attended every major concert in the ungenerous hope that the conductor would drop dead and he, George Conway, could snatch the baton from the dying hand.

Author Hubbard’s tale is subtitled A Ridiculous Novel, and so it is, in a farcically amusing way. It tells how Psychiatrist Durrant-Atwill, displaying zeal above and beyond the couch, arranges the kidnaping of a famed British conductor on his way to a continental music festival, enabling George Conway to palm himself off on the foreign orchestra as the great man himself, and to scourge the players through many a furious rehearsal. It ends happily ever after with Uncle George not only promoted to Assistant Secretary to the Ministry but also appointed official “guest-conductor” to Europe’s finest orchestra.

Novelist Hubbard is headmaster of a Surrey school named Pitmans College, and there can be small doubt that his first entry in fictionship will dilate his pupils.