Mr. Beethoven by Paul Griffiths (Henningham Family Press)

All through last year, 250 years after his birth, Beethoven was remembered in as many ways as the year allowed, though not often with the imaginative insight Paul Griffiths' displays in 'Mr Beethoven', a novel in which he permits the great composer to live for "several years more, enough to travel to Boston in 1833". In this reconfigured life, he has been commissioned by The Handel and Haydn Society to write an oratorio, the circumstances of which will bring him into contact with a range of people from within the multiplicity that constituted American society at that time. That variousness is echoed and doubled through Griffiths' inventiveness with the form and language used throughout the novel, allowing him to deploy a variety of registers and modulations. All of this allows Griffiths to be as playfully contradictory or cantankerous as he wishes; giving three different versions of one scene or bursting into the novel to protest, "Sorry, but we have to stop you there. You keep teasing us with this "great work" while offering as little information as you can get away with."

The opening chapters have the elegance of the best 19th-century novels, while later chapters develop the character of Beethoven through excerpts from letters and diaries and conversations (all of which are restricted to the use of words, clauses or complete sentences from letters Beethoven wrote, thus achieving a high level of veracity in a wholly imagined setting). To allow the composer - at this stage entirely deaf - to engage in conversations, Griffiths introduces a young woman called Thankful to teach him sign language and to be his voice when needed. Their bond becomes a strong one and is mutually respectful. In the house of an arrogant and bumptious landowner called Josiah Quincy III - whose invitation to Beethevon to stay at his house appears to be a search for greatness by association - his wife decides that Thankful - a servant, surely - be moved away from the main table while they eat dinner. Beethoven insists that she must stay. That Quincy III is later portrayed as a person of sensitivity and empathetic awareness of nature is an indication of the depth of characterisation in the novel and the author's instinct to always avoid an obvious direction. The company of Beethoven allows his thoughts unregulated freedom: "with you walking here beside me, I feel I can say whatever comes into my head, however inappropriate . . . We all have secret rooms in our souls that we will not open to anyone . . . Yes, I fear we all keep ourselves strangers. Otherwise any kind of social life would be quite impossible."

When the time comes for Beethoven to complete his commission, we are given a very convincing analysis of the work. The rehearsals for the work bring with them, in every sense, a range of voices. The musicians and choir bring further colour to the novel along with an audience for the music and the attention of the composer which gives Griffiths further licence to speculate about just who might have wanted to attend the first performance and to have sought out the composer in the lead up to the premiere. An embroidered handkerchief and a poem are sent to him. It can only be by Emily Dickinson, beginning as it does:

"The Pin is not the Pencil -

The needle cannot speak -"

An interview is sought by, and given to, a precious young man who is particularly struck by Beethoven saying that an editor who has displeased him might be "harpooned in the northern waters among the whales!" Harpooned whales? There's an idea around which a novel might be formed. Longfellow appears to have written a libretto, or part of one, for an "Indian Operetta". Scholarly analysis of the evidence ensues. Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller are present at the premier. Emily Dickinson seems to be there too with - how could it be - children?

Best of all the imaginings is the encounter between Beethoven and a Native American who is especially curious about the form of musical notation used by the composer and the musician's ability to create "coloured air" from those signs. This meeting - in which two ways of understanding what is occurring when music is played - allows for interventions and minglings which are, one might say, pitch-perfect.

The Beethoven we meet here is not the bad-tempered Beethoven of repute. Instead, in another example of Griffiths' opting for the less obvious option, he seems quite agreeable, friendly and aware of the needs and sensitivities of those around him. In this characterisation, as throughout the novel - even allowing for the self-imposed fidelity to Beethoven's words - Paul Griffiths uses the freedom of the novel to the fullest and most resourceful extent necessary to tell this speculative story. "Did it all really happen?" asks Thankful at the end. Well, of course, we know it didn't. But this is what fiction is for.