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March 23, 2021
Elizabeth Brooks' Playlist for Her Novel "The Whispering House"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Elizabeth Brooks' novel The Whispering House is impressive, a book both unsettling and unforgettable.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"Hauntingly gothic . . . This quietly unsettling tale holds its secrets close, making for a powerful story of loss and longing."
In her words, here is Elizabeth Brooks' Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Whispering House:
The Whispering House revolves around Byrne Hall, a grand old estate in the south-west of England. Two sisters, Stella and Freya, are fatally drawn to the house, and its eccentric owners. Although the novel is contemporary (most of it takes place in 2014) the atmosphere is old world. Byrne Hall is the sort of place—isolated, claustrophobic, technologically backward—where you might forget which century you’re in, if you stay for more than a day or two. . .
1. “What I Miss About You” by Katie Melua
For some reason this song got lodged in my brain when I was planning The Whispering House, and became part of the creative process. It’s a song about feeling two contradictory things at the same time: I miss you, I don’t miss you; I love you, I hate you; being with you was heaven, being with you was hell. I love the way in which the song simply states these contradictions, without trying to resolve them. The line, “If it’s true that love is blind, then I was blind willingly,” could have been written for my naïve protagonist, Freya.
2. “Dream A Little Dream of Me”
There’s a wedding reception at the start of the novel, and as a balmy summer evening falls over Byrne Hall, and fairy-lights twinkle in the trees, the jazz band strikes up this song. “Dream A Little Dream of Me” is a classic of the Great American Songbook: idyllic, innocent and totally unjaded in its attitude to romance. No wonder Freya is seduced by her first glimpse of Byrne Hall, with this song playing in the background.
3. “Scarborough Fair”
When the wedding is over, Freya returns to her humdrum life, but it isn’t long before she’s drawn back to Byrne Hall. As she’s pulling her suitcase along the seafront in the local town, wondering how to find her way to the house, she passes a busker who “was playing a folky tune on her guitar—“Scarborough Fair,” I think—and the notes sounded strange and small in the thundery air.” I chose this song for the busker because it’s timeless, mysterious, and full of a strange melancholy—much like the world Freya is about to enter.
4. “Run to you” by Whitney Houston
Freya is sitting in a down-at-heel café, with a mug of tea and a greasy bacon sandwich. A few short hours ago her life was a dreamy idyll, but she’s come back down to earth with a bump, and that’s where she seems doomed to stay. There’s an easy-listening show playing on the café’s tinny radio, and she can hear a man humming along as he washes up in the kitchen. The song isn’t named, but in my mind it’s “Run to You”. I like the idea of an extravagant power-ballad, giving voice to all Freya’s confusion and heartache, being played in such an unromantic setting. The discrepancy feels faintly comic, but at the same time moving and real.
5. “It’s not Unusual” by Tom Jones
There’s a second wedding reception at Byrne Hall, but it’s completely different from the first, with garish lights, booming speakers and a drunken, aggressive mood. Although no songs are named, ‘It’s not Unusual’ fits the bill. It’s bombastic and unsubtle, and the lyrics are more about jealousy and emotional blackmail than love.
6. “Fernando” by ABBA. (Also “Dancing Queen” and “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme”)
Freya recalls a New Year’s Eve party in 2008, during which her live-wire sister, Stella, stole the show by dancing on the sofa to ABBA. I chose ABBA for this scene because their songs have a way of blending joy and sadness in a really exquisite way. Somehow even the happiest, liveliest of ABBA songs—even ‘Dancing Queen’—carries a hint of darkness, as do Freya’s memories of the childhood and adolescence she shared with Stella.
7. “Bulletproof” by La Roux
Stella lands at Byrne Hall in 2009. “She hadn’t arrived with a lot of luggage, but somehow her tangled-up clothes littered every room; her music filled the house; her wild moods sucked up all the oxygen and made it breathe.” Freya is the sort of person who only plays music if she actually intends to listen, whereas Stella likes to have it on all the time, as background noise. She enjoys whatever is current, without being particularly choosy, and “Bulletproof” is a 2009 song that fits her perfectly. I love the way the singer comes across as vulnerable, by insisting she’s the opposite—it’s very touching, and very ‘Stella’.
8. “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush
Towards the end of the book, Freya is coerced into wearing a long, white dress, which she hates. It puts her in mind of ‘Wuthering Heights’—both the novel and the song—and she’s tempted to make a joke along those lines, but is too scared to do so. The atmosphere of Kate Bush’s song, balanced so precariously between tragic and comic, weird and earthy, echoes Freya’s position at this point in the story.
9. “The Trout Quintet” (2nd Movement) by Franz Schubert
One dark, stormy night, Byrne Hall stages an art exhibition. The artist wants to create a ‘classy’ atmosphere, so he sticks on a Schubert CD. Unfortunately for him, the effect is more sinister than sophisticated: “There weren’t enough speakers for all this space, and the music sounded small and faraway, as if a quintet of ghosts had struck up in the cellar. To make matters worse, the wind was picking up outside and the music couldn’t compete; it could only add a thread of unease to the bigger, crazier sounds of the storm.”
Elizabeth Brooks’ debut novel, The Orphan of Salt Winds, was hailed by BuzzFeed as “evocative, gothic, and utterly transportive.” She grew up in Chester, England, graduated from Cambridge University, and resides on the Isle of Man with her husband and two children.
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