Like the first novel in this trilogy, The Rebel Angels, this is less a novel than an extended philosophical riff by the author. Most of the characters are indistinguishable from each other when they speak; they're obvious stand-ins for Davies' musings on life . But while there's more of a story this time around, this one is charmless. The characters are pretentious and self-important, and by the halfway point they start to grate. It's strange that The Rebel Angels somehow works, when it really doesn't tell much of a story and goes on for pages at a time on a soapbox. What's Bred In The Bone is a proper novel and a great one. But The Lyre Of Orpheus has little to recommend it, other than an interesting look at the creation of an opera. Davies tries too hard to infuse everything with meaning and life lessons and it was all too much for me. I wanted a story; what I got was a boozy after-dinner conversation between academics that went on too long.

The final book in the Cornish trilogy picks up where the first book left off, with the Cornish Trust board of directors, Hollier, Darcourt, Maria, Arthur Cornish, and Geraint Powell, deciding to stage a reconstructed opera by one of the university students, even though there is no libretto and the student is a doctoral candidate who has never attempted something of this magnitude before. The opera, an unfinished piece by E.T.A. Hoffman, is Arthur, or The Magnanimous Cuckold, an attempt to put the story of King Arthur as a true opera (rather than the singing in a story of Camelot). The student, Schnak, they soon discover is a belligerent and odiferous genius, but nothing compared to the special advisor that is brought in from Sweden, Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot. Darcourt, meanwhile, is frustrated because he is having little luck completing the biography of Francis Cornish, and now is tagged to write a libretto for this opera. Everything comes together, although never in quite the way you expect it to, which is the beauty of Davies’ novels.

Frustrating and boring and bad.