In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Phoebe Greenwood’s novel Vulture is an impressive debut that leverages dark humor to brilliantly portray a young journalist’s coming-of-age in Gaza.
NPR wrote of the book:
“It’s hard to say that the book is hilarious given all the graphic death and destruction, but Vulture is a daring dark comedy that doesn’t shy away from the horrors that have been going on in the Palestinian territories for too long.”
In her own words, here is Phoebe Greenwood’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Vulture:
I Am I Said, Stones, Neil Diamond (1971)
There was a period where I was writing Vulture with an exclusively Neil Diamond soundtrack in mind. Its protagonist, Sara Byrne, is a woman who struggles with feelings. A reporter hoping to make a name for herself in the 2012 war in Gaza, she narrates events with an apparent callousness, alarmingly cut off from the horror and violence. But she doesn’t know how to start engaging with what she’s seeing, she can’t. She’s too cut off from her own pain and grief with their run-of-the-mill middle-class causes: rejection by the awful man she loves, the death of her cruel father.
There was something accurate about the sadness of this woman only being able to feel when listening to the music of a white American man at least twice her age; her fetish for the tastes of the older men whose rejection has defined her. In her backstory, which runs in reverse chronology through the events of the war, we understand more about those men, whose generation’s music I’m thieving for this playlist.
At one of their first meetings, which comes towards the end of the book, Sara’s lover sings to her the lyrics of this song: I am, I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all, not even the chair. It is, in my opinion, one of the best lyrics of all time. The song goes on: I am I cried, I am said I, and I am lost and I can’t even say why.
It’s the saddest thing — a man totally alone, not knowing why, even the chair ignoring him! And it sort of sums Sara up.
Alyi El Kofia, as performed by Mohammed Assaf at the Arab Idol final in 2013
Mohammed Assaf was a wedding singer in Gaza who became a national hero when he won Arab Idol in 2013. I was a correspondent based in Jerusalem between 2010 and 2013 and spent a lot of time in Gaza, including one war in 2012 that I covered from very beginning to past the end. I reimagined my experience of this war in Vulture.
Assaf won Arab Idol a year after Vulture is set, a period of recovery in Gaza after the 2012 war, there is a joy and hope in his performance that now feels tragically misplaced.
Whenever I watch this video of Assaf performing at the final, which I did quite often while writing Vulture, I’m moved, often to tears, by the Arab world — by way of the studio audience of a reality TV show — raising their symbolic keffiyehs in support of Palestine (Assaf). The judges are teary-eyed, dancing Dabke. It’s such a poignant contrast to how criminally little the Arab world has done to support Gaza, in either political or actual terms.
Film star handsome, charming, eloquent, gentle, Assaf was a favourite among the foreign media. An acceptable young Palestinian man. A rare feel-good story from Gaza. Sara would have been among those clamouring to interview him.
Time of the Season, the Zombies (1968)
This track was released during the Vietnam War but it’s not about the war. For the Zombies, 1968 wasn’t a season of protest, it was time for sex and love. For a book set in a war, Vulture’s hero is also consumed by thoughts of sex and memories of her unrequited love. In some ways, this is a story about how rejection and obsessive love can make you a sociopath.
Sara’s mad love for her ex is very wrapped up in the messed up relationship she had with her now dead father. Colin Blunstone sings about a woman that sounds like a Sara to me: What’s your name? Who’s your Daddy? Is he rich like me? Has he taken any time to show you what you need to live?
There’s quite a bit of bleak sex in Vulture. It’s a phenomenon, well documented, that I’ve seen a bit first hand: gross promiscuity in war and disaster zones. After a working day confronting death, violence and destruction, maybe people just need the comfort of being close to someone. Perhaps they need reminding they’re still alive. Maybe it’s the easiest catharsis, particularly if, like Sara, you can’t cry.
Me and My Arrow, The Point, Harry Nilsson (1970)
By the end of Vulture, the backstory leads us to five year-old Sara and we get to the root of the problem. Writing those younger scenes involved tricking my brain into a toddler reality and I find music is a quick cheat to getting yourself back to a time, place or feeling. At that age I was obsessed with two albums: The Point (Harry Nillson) and Pet Sounds (The Beach Boys). I played those vinyls over and over again for hours on end. There’s not a lyric or instrumental line I don’t know inside out.
The Point is the ultimate outsider soundtrack: the boy with no point in a world of points banned to the pointless forest with his one true friend, the dog Arrow. In Sara’s case, she’s alone in bombed Gaza with only her father’s malevolent spirit in the form of a pigeon as an ally. Their odysseys, Sara’s and Oblio’s, at least in her mind, are similar.
Early Blue, FJ McMahon (1969)
This is a song about not being able to face the reality of a life you’re unhappy with but knowing you have to. Waking up, making yourself face the day, finding it’s not actually the unmitigated disaster you expected, but still not finding it good and waking up the next morning unwillingly.
Sara’s numb detachment is basically depression. She’s not been able to cope with the loss of the man she thought she loved and the father she could never make love her. This isn’t groundbreaking trauma, but that’s sort of the point: people with mundane Western dysfunction are often drawn to the oblivion of conflict and the comfort of other peoples’ disasters.
It’s a failure to engage with the reality of her life that leads her to take such reckless risks in Gaza and endangering everyone around her. For me, this song has something of the spirit of Vulture’s final chapters as Sara is presented with the consequences of her actions, but can’t face them.
And I run away
Don’t wanna see early blue today.
Phoebe Greenwood is a writer and journalist living in London. Between 2010 and 2013, she was a freelance correspondent in Jerusalem covering the Middle East for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times. From 2013 to 2021, she was an editor and correspondent at the Guardian specialising in foreign affairs.