Beyond the antithesis of her title, [Music and Silence], Anne Redmon suggests in this disturbing and emotionally violent novel, is the antithesis of good and evil, represented here by two women: Beatrice, a doctor who derives little comfort from her compelling need to relieve the sufferings of her fellows but plunges the more despairingly into the rigours of prayer and contemplation; and Maud, a talented, guilt-ridden young cellist unable to lay the ghosts of her horrifying childhood and broken anew by the shattering of the relationship with her teacher, Alba…. [The] apparently random and menacing irruption into the women's lives of a religious maniac fuses their destinies in an appalling way…. The pace is uneven, the development frequently obscure, the style at times almost self-indulgently baroque, but the novel has considerable strength and energy and a descriptive richness that lingers in the mind.