It recounts a meeting between the author and Wolfgang Mozart, reincarnated as a Nigerian doctor, who offers a corrective to the received perspectives of Mozart’s life. The story suggests that modern readings of Mozart’s milieu are hampered by us being ‘foreign strangers’. For all our efforts to understand, based on the evidence available to us, all our cultural assumptions will necessarily be ’slightly off-centre, the tone always slightly skewed. That was sort of it, I suppose, but at the same time it wasn’t it by miles.‘

Why does this matter?

He says ‘I can now see how intimately smells are bound up with history… Smell had yet to become pathologised or politicised, whichever you prefer. Germs weren’t known about. Pasteur’s discoveries lay a hundred years in the future.’ It wasn’t until well after Mozart’s death that the middle-classes used smell to distance themselves from the proletariat. ‘Suddenly they developed these acutely sensitive noses for smells they never used to mind and which the masses still didn’t seem to notice.’ After that ‘more than a century went by before we were handed all that analytical stuff about coprophilia and masochism. Shit had changed its meaning by then.’

This is fascinating enough territory, but Hamilton-Paterson then makes a creative leap to connect the history of smell with Mozart the working musician. ‘Last night I vividly remembered what it was like, sitting there, sitting there writing music for hours, usually cold, the table all gritty with sand… I’d open my legs and crack a long bubbly one and let the smell come drifting up over the edge of the table and inhale it like incense. It was my smell, it came from within, exactly as the music did. They both came from me and no-one else. They were inseparable, part of my power.’

‘Mozart’ objects to the ‘maiden-aunt’ tone of commentary on his personality. ‘When I say these idiots are ignorant I really mean it. They have no idea what things were like then, over two hundred years ago and counting.’ Our desire to see Mozart as a revolutionary reflects our view of his society rather than his. ‘They see my rebelliousness as political. They think I was a closet radical… I wasn’t anything of the kind. I and most of my friends were Masons, for heaven’s sake. I was very conservative, like my family… I feared God and had nothing against Royalty per se. What we despised were the hypocrites who sometimes wore archbishop’s vestments.’

In that society ‘life was completely stratified. Social levels were elaborately drawn, constantly reinforced by custom and protocol and verbal formulae.’ And this in part explains the tone of his off-duty language. ‘Faced with the hermetic and flouncy social hierarchy of court life… we gave vent to our feelings by going to the opposite extreme in private. While off-duty we naturally sang canons in dialect to words like “Lick my arse really good and clean”… And of course we mocked formal occasions by giving after-dinner speeches about excrement. It wasn’t childish, it was damn well life-saving, believe me.’

I love the way Hamilton-Paterson blows the cobwebs out of our perceptions of Mozart, pleading for a more nuanced and empathetic reading through the absurd, magic-realist means of a re-incarnated Mozart drinking lager in a modern beach bar. He articulates his polemic against an unimaginative view of the past by summoning his subject out of his time into a baffling modern world.

So Hamilton-Paterson’s Mozart is more sympathetically imaginative than other portrayals, but is he more authentic? On the one hand, plainly not: it’s a fiction, deliberately combative, contrarian, unconstrained by needing academic citation for his arguments. But in another way the novelist’s freedom to invent can take him closer to ‘the authentic’ than the historian, whose scrupulous reliance on evidence is supposed to be the surest route.

Hamilton-Paterson’s invents a Mozart whose grumpiness, free association, self-aggrandisement and wit may be no nearer the ‘real man’ than Peter Shaffer’s giggling lech, or Emily Anderson’s regrettable potty-mouth. But what his act of invention tells us is very instructive.

In looking at figures from the past we should not overlook imagination, not often thought of as an academic virtue. ‘Kind of’ understanding the past is as bad as missing the point completely. Assuming we are wiser, more thoughtful, more intelligent, more anything than ‘they’ were ‘then’ is always to doom us to failure. We need to bear in mind Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’. We can be sympathetic to aspects of historical lives to which we can relate, but there are others we know nothing about: they were so obvious to people then they didn’t need stating but so obscure to us now we don’t realise they were there. Like Mozart’s feelings about the smell of his world.

The more confident we we get in feeling we have an understanding of lives in the past the more vulnerable our position becomes. The more we remember we ‘have no idea what things were like then’ the better we stay on our guard; the more we use our imagination, the better we remember the ‘great composers’ were people before they became research projects. They ate lunch, brushed their hair, thought about sex and picked their bums on the same day they wrote great music. Lose sight of this and we lose sight of the humanity we share with them.