Chaconne is the story of an apprenticeship – in life, love and early music – in which not the least of the obstacles standing in the way of Eleanor's becoming who she might be is Eleanor Weston herself. Against the Cold War craziness of the early 1980s, the novel traces, with wit as well as lyricism, a young Australian woman's failed pursuit of love with a bourgeois communist in Paris and her subsequent shift to the periphery of a US airbase in the Rhineland, where she stumbles into marriage with a seemingly harmless American. When Thomas, a successful harpsichordist and self-hating German, comes to the village to recuperate after a nervous collapse, he and Eleanor form a deep musical connection that not only sets her voice free but allows her to find, in the crisis that ensues, more nerve and resolve than she ever knew she had.
