The Tragedy of the Book Soundtrack - by Clémentine Beauvais

Being of a sarcastic disposition, I'd spent the past few years secretly laughing at the very fashionable trend of writing 'soundtracks' for novels. I'd discovered the concept with Stephenie Meyer (though I know it had been around for a while before), who on her website had denounced Muse as the number one, well, muse, for her glittery vampires.

Since then, I'd seen it appear again and again on various author websites, and I'd done my own snarky theorisation of the emerging craze. A book soundtrack, I'd decided, is a bricolage of the following things:

• Songs that the author really listened to when writing the book.
• Songs that the author really listens to, but not necessarily when writing the book.
• Songs that are more or less linked to the novel, and/or that characters of the novel listen to or identify with. 
• Songs that the author would like us to believe s/he listens to, but which in fact s/he doesn't really care about, but which will add trendiness points to the book and sprinkle it with cool, whereas if the author really put in the songs that s/he actually listens to, it would be an eclectic mix of 1980s pop, teenage-unfriendly cheese, and classical music. 

(Being of a relatively cynical disposition, I sometimes reflected that the fourth bullet point was probably often the most accurate.)

Anyway, book soundtracks are generally made up of ten to fifteen songs, and they wait for you on the author website there - wait for you, the reader, to come and read them and... erm... do what with them exactly? 

This is a chin-scratchingly mysterious riddle. What am I supposed to do, o music-savvy author, with your violently fashionable soundtrack? Listen to it while reading the book? Listen to it before reading the book? After? Listen to bits of it here and there? Some soundtracks even state which chapter corresponds to which song, steady on, this is serious business. What do I do, listen to the thing on loop while reading the chapter? It's definitely going to become my favourite song that way (not). Anyway, I don't even like listening to music while I read. 

In short, I'd been absolutely snarky and completely blasé about the hilarious trend of book sountracks, and I would go 'pffsha!' and even 'pfff!' like a good French person everytime the ludicrous phenomenon was mentioned to me. 

(I hope I used enough foreshadowing for you to guess that this blog post is actually following the story arc of a classical tragedy and that my hubris regarding the dreaded thing is going to lead to my own personal catastrophe.)

Catastrophe struck a few weeks ago, when my (French) editor innocently emailed me the following, re: YA novel coming out in a few months' time:

Oh yes I'll also need your soundtrack asap please.

Me:

Er what?

Him:

All novels in this list have soundtracks at the beginning, with songs that have inspired the book, etc.

[I'd previously published with them but not in this specific YA list]

Me:

Ah ok well unfortunately I don't know any songs. In fact I don't know what a 'song' is. I think I vaguely heard someone talk about that concept once but I've forgotten what it means, and I've Googled it and nothing comes up. So I'm sorry but it's not going to be possible. 

Editor:

Write that soundtrack.

 Me:

Not today, I'm going snail-hunting.

Editor:

Write it.

Me: 

You know what, you do it and I'll credit you in the acknowledgements.  

 Editor:

No.

O! How ironic Fate can be, who knits our destiny exactly as we wish she did not! Wouldst that she were less playful! I was plunged into an abyss of angst. Because I've been a bit dishonest with you. It's not just that I find book soundtracks perfectly ludicrous. It's also that I'm terribly jealous of people who can write them. Because I have a huge musical inferiority complex.

In short, I have a s*** taste in music.

There it is, I've said it. I have no musical taste to speak of. My iTunes library is a dreadful smorgasbord of the most shameful musical creations, or rather noise, from around the world. My worst nightmare is that it should ever get leaked online, condemning me to a life in exile with gouged-out eyes in the manner of another tragic hero whose problem was barely worse than mine.

Following this exchange, I spent three or four hours biting all my nails and thinking of possible solutions to this predicament:

1. Ask my eighteen-year-old sister, who oozes trendiness and is completely made of cool, to write a soundtrack for the novel in exchange for my not mentioning her abundantly Facebook-documented booze nights to the parents. 
2. Resort to the so-called 'undergrad strategy' of sending a corrupt file entitled 'soundtrack.doc' to my editor, and then pretending I'm not gettting any of his emails for two or three days despite being very conspicuously active on Twitter.
3. Resort to the 'Simba' strategy of going away for most of the rest of my life, overstaying my welcome in the home of a smelly warthog and a hysterical meercat.
4. Actually go through my iTunes library and see what I can salvage from the humiliating playlist.

Being of an honest disposition (as well as the aforementioned cynicism and sarcasm), I opted for the last one. I conscientiously went through my iTunes library with a fine-tooth comb, selecting only the socially acceptable songs. Unfortunately it was too fine and nothing came out, so I selected a slightly wider-toothed comb, and this time a dozen songs fell out, which I carefully packaged and sent off to my editor.

Reply:

Oh. Ah. Right. Ah! Erm. Ok.

 Me:

Told you. 

I think he wore mourning clothes for a week after that. But anyway, it's done - the lamest book soundtrack in history will soon be printed on the endpapers of my upcoming YA novel (and no, I'm certainly not posting it here). It is entirely possible that because of it, the publishing house will go bankrupt within two days and trigger inextinguishable fits of laughter throughout France in the process.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at you, author of books which cannot possibly be fully understood without a sountrack. Explain to me how you ever managed to reach that level of cool which I clearly can't attain, and why you do it - what dark hopes are woven into this exercise you clearly devote so much thought to, what we're supposed to do with the music, etc. And can I please hire you next time for this fearsome task.

_____________________________________

Clementine Beauvais writes soundtrack-less books in both French and English. The former are of all kinds and shapes, and the latter, for now, a humour/adventure detective series, the Sesame Seade mysteries. She blogs here about children's literature and academia and is on Twitter @blueclementine.

Why children’s books are the opposite of tragedies - C.J. Busby

I was thinking the other day about how, in so many children’s books, the hero finds they have hidden powers. I think it’s one of the aspects of children’s books I love the most, and loved especially as a child myself – the sense that, however ordinary you felt you were, there might be this magical ability hidden inside you, or some unexpected aspect of your character, just waiting for the right opportunity, the right trigger, to reveal itself. 

In one of my favourite books as a child, Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones, Cat Chant discovers, after many trials and mix-ups, that he’s an enchanter – from being a child who could do absolutely no magic, he becomes one who can make almost anything happen by just telling it to. In Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Will discovers he’s an Old One, and learns to use his new powers to fight the Dark. And Harry Potter, ordinary downtrodden child, finds he is really a wizard, and a very special one at that. 

But in more mundane ways, many children’s books chart the ways their protagonists learn to draw on hidden strengths or find reserves of bravery, intelligence, compassion, understanding, or determination to overcome obstacles and win through in difficult or challenging circumstances. 

In The Lord of the Rings, for example, it is the 'children' of the book, the hobbits, who really save Middle Earth - and they do so by finding in themselves the sort of courage, grit, compassion, confidence and ability to survive that they'd never have dreamed of in sleepy Hobbiton. The change in them is made gloriously manifest in their final return to the Shire and the battle with Sharkey.

In essence, these sorts of stories tell their readers – you can be amazing! It’s a great message for children – indeed, for any reader. It says, nothing about you is fixed, you don’t have to accept that you are only ever going to be this person or that person. Round the corner, an adventure might be waiting that will draw out of you all sorts of things – that will change you into a kind of hero, with new and unexpected powers. No matter that you are not top of the class, or ‘gifted and talented’, no matter that you think of yourself as ‘ordinary’ – there’s always hope.

This kind of transformative possibility in children’s books seems to me to be the very opposite of tragedy. In tragedies, most often, it’s the inherent flaws in the protagonist’s character that lead to the inevitable tragic outcome. Hamlet’s total introspection, his inability to stop dithering; Othello’s insane jealousy; Coriolanus’s pride; or in the classic Greek tragedies, the hero’s hubris, or their rigidity, or the inevitable repercussions of one terrible action. There’s a feeling of watching a slow motion train crash – nothing stops the slide towards mutual destruction because none of the characters are capable of changing who they are. When I was in my twenties, life sometimes felt exactly like this, and when it did, my best friend and I used to wail: ‘Aargh - I’m in an Iris Murdoch novel!’

In much adult literature events unfold in this way – the characters, like Martin Luther, ‘can do no other’, they react to each other and to events in ways that drive the plot forward, and it’s not very often that one of them finds a hidden power that solves the tangle they’ve all got themselves into. For me, then, tragedy is a quintessentially grown-up (‘literary’) form of literature, about people working through the consequences of who they are, who they have become. But children are always becoming, and so children’s literature seems to me in its purest form the very opposite of tragedy – characterised not by comedy, but a kind of positive hopefulness, an expectation of finding some new, positive aspect of yourself which explodes into the plot and turns it on its head.

This seems especially important to me now, when schools – even primary – are riddled with exams and tests and gradings: children, according to Ofsted good practice, should know exactly what National Curriculum Level they are (a 3a, or a 4b) and why they aren’t yet at the next level up. There is only one path allowed: three points of progress in academic work per school year. Ofsted is not interested in whether you might, in the meantime, have fought dragons, or learnt to conjure a whirlwind.

As with all generalisations, I’m sure people will find exceptions and caveats, and I don’t at all mean to be prescriptive. It’s not that I think all children’s books must conform to this model – but for me, the ‘ideal type’, if you like, of a children’s book, is that it has this sort of transformative hope at its centre. And the ideal anti-type is the tragedy.


C.J. Busby writes funny, fast paced fantasy for primary age children.

Her latest book, Deep Amber, is a multiple worlds adventure for 8-12, published March 2014 by Templar.

'This is an adventure... here are runes and swords and incredibly stupid knights in armour – enjoy!' (ABBA Reviews: Read the rest of the review here).

Website: www.cjbusby.co.uk

Twitter: @ceciliabusby