Jeremy Cooper’s Discord is a perfectly pitched comedy

Jeremy Cooper’s previous novel, Brian (2023), documented the obsessive cinema-going of a reclusive council clerk, recording his impressions of more than 150 films from The Full Monty to Pasolini’s Salò. Comic but never mocking or twee, it’s a masterclass in tone, taking the titular protagonist seriously even as we suspect the book’s funny side wouldn’t always be visible to him. David Nicholls said its brilliance put him off his own idea for a novel about movies; Zadie Smith liked it so much she wrote an as-yet-unproduced screenplay.

Cooper’s new novel, Discord, is about music. It follows Rebekah, a classical composer whose early promise has flatlined in middle age, stymied by the self-doubt that stops her completing projects. She’s at work on a piece for the Proms, fed by her discovery of a wartime record of crop yields on a south London allotment: the basis, she hopes, for an experiment in rhythm drawn from nature. Needing a soloist, she’s introduced to Evie, a young superstar saxophonist from Yorkshire, as natural a performer as Rebekah is awkward, strutting stages around the world in flamboyant outfits and Messi-branded football boots.

A kind of odd-couple comedy ensues. Told in close third person, the novel alternates between each woman’s perspective, replaying moments in their unlikely partnership. The question of how Rebekah’s piece will come off supplies tension throughout an otherwise unforced amble through the 12 months leading up to the performance. We follow the central pair together and apart in a range of attentively drawn locales, from Amsterdam (scene of a bonding trip concocted to thaw Evie’s lingering reservations about the enterprise) to Rebekah’s home on a farm in Devon, where she considers giving up music to do nothing but listen to sheep, “learning to recognise the individual intonations as accurately as they did of each other’s”.

Although the novel twinkles with humour, Cooper never signposts what we should think; his crisply managed scenes, borne chiefly on drifting tides of thought and memory, let us draw our own conclusions about the characters’ crisscrossing temperaments. Rebekah, fearing “the dilution of scarce good feelings about herself by letting them out in public”, is initially too superstitious even to tell Evie that her piece has been commissioned by the BBC. Evie, exasperated, nevertheless develops a guarded respect for Rebekah’s eccentric ambition, manifest in her desire to capture the noise of roots underground: “She has yet to pinpoint, she acknowledged, the actual sound of this infinitesimal movement of growth. Maybe she never would? Worth continuing to try.”

Yet Rebekah’s vaulting sense of purpose is always vulnerable to paralysis; while Evie, briskly at ease with her own talent, is the kind of no-nonsense character whose to-do list on one page includes recruiting a new viola player for her ensemble, booking an abortion, invoicing her tailor, writing a piece for Sight & Sound and rehearsing a recording.

While there are stabs of pathos in the lop-sided relationship that blossoms – for Rebekah, Evie is an object of loving awe; for Evie, it’s just another gig – Cooper never milks the novel’s dual-perspective scheme for irony, still less cheap laughs. His unsolemn yet wholly unsatirical treatment of his characters’ seriousness is key (as in Brian) to the powerful emotion Discord generates.

The story’s heart is Rebekah – closest, you suspect, to Cooper himself, who once told The Observer of his preference for a solitary life “doing the same thing at the same time seven days a week, including Christmas, which I ignore” – yet Evie is never reduced to a foil. And for a book without a plot, our anticipation is electric when, with 40 pages to go, we realise we’re still weeks away from the performance; the ending, when it finally comes, is exquisitely poised.

Discord by Jeremy Cooper is published by Fitzcarraldo (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Amy Howden-Chapman