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October 30, 2019
Nina Allan's Playlist for Her Novel "The Dollmaker"
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, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
NIna Allan's The Dollmaker is a fascinating, intricately constructed novel that defies genre.
Booklist wrote of the book:
"Exquisitely dark…the novel’s unusual structure and compelling characters weave a hypnotic plot."
In her own words, here is Nina Allan's Book Notes music playlist for her novel The Dollmaker:
The Dollmaker is a novel of interlocking parts, and all those parts come saturated in music. Our protagonist, Andrew Garvie, is not musical himself but stumbles repeatedly against the musical talents and aspirations of others. A knight of the grail, a modern Parsifal, his personal quest verges upon the operatic. The object of his courtly love is Bramber Winters, and Bramber’s mother was herself a failed opera singer. Andrew and Bramber are drawn together through the sinister fairy tales of Ewa Chaplin, a refugee whose mother likewise had her musical career ruined in an accident. Whilst Andrew journeys through life as the hero of his own opera, both Bramber and Ewa feel music as a threat. Music in The Dollmaker is both magic and mayhem. Some of the tracks that make up this playlist are drawn directly from the novel. Others are more elusive, suggesting themes or feelings or memories that might arise from it.
1) ‘Der Zwerg’ by Franz Schubert/Matthias von Collin (Thomas Quasthoff/Charles Spencer)
The words of this song form one of The Dollmaker's epigraphs, and can be read as an inverse summary – an anti-plot, if you like – of the novel itself. As with all of Schubert’s Lieder, the piano is not merely an accompaniment to the voice, but an active partner in painting a musical picture. In ‘Der Zwerg’, the piano evokes the lapping of the waves as the dwarf and his queen head out to sea, helping to create the mood of darkness and foreboding that permeates the song. The story of ‘Der Zwerg’ is a story of individuals trapped in roles that have been dictated for them by an oppressive society.
The singer in this recording, Thomas Quasthoff, has birth defects and a form of dwarfism caused by the drug Thalidomide. For him to perform this particular work seems to me a radically subversive act, the act of a great artist. Quasthoff himself, as well as his superlative renditions of Schubert’s Winterreise and Schwanengesang, was a key inspiration for this novel.
2) ‘A Sailor’s Life’ by Anonymous (Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention)
Driven by Richard Thompson’s guitar and Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle, crowned by Sandy Denny’s starkly reflective vocals, ‘A Sailor’s Life’ was recorded in a single take and remains one of the major building blocks of British folk rock. Fairport’s music for me is powerfully reminiscent of summer days and moonlit nights, dusty roads and the scent of dry grass and I cannot hear their uniquely powerful rendition of this traditional ballad – a quest, a doomed romance, a ship and a queen – without thinking of Andrew as he first embarks on his westward journey. The great seafaring history of Cornwall is everywhere present in the song’s rhythms, inspired by traditional reels, hornpipes and sea shanties.
3) ‘Clog Dance’ from La Fille Mal Gardée by Ferdinand Hérold (Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden/John Lanchbery)
One of Andrew’s most formative influences – for both good and ill – is the aesthete, antiquarian and abuser Wilson Crosse, who Andrew meets by chance in his local library. Wil’s house is filled with antiques and collectibles of every kind, most notably the rare automata Wil terms his ‘rude mechanicals’. This famous set piece from the ballet La Fille Mal Gardée puts me immediately in mind of the stilted movements of these mischievous figures, as well as the unnerving atmosphere of the house itself.
4) Waltz in A minor Op 34/2 by Fryderyk Chopin (Vladimir Ashkenazy)
This is the piece played by Naomie Walmer in Ewa Chaplin’s story ‘The Elephant Girl’. Following Naomie’s recital, the young musical prodigy Zhanna Mauriac transcribes the waltz from memory. Her teacher believes Zhanna’s talent to be a bad omen, and is horrified. ‘She could still hear the music, the long meandering coda that had always seemed to Mila like the sounds of someone talking in their sleep.’ The Op 34 A minor is my favourite of Chopin’s waltzes because of its deep melancholy, almost the antithesis of how a waltz is commonly imagined.
Chopin makes another, later appearance in The Dollmaker, when a certain housekeeper makes an ill-fated decision to ask a doctor on a date...
5) ‘Sweet Sir Galahad’ by Joan Baez
The Dollmaker is a novel of signs and symbols, and it is not by accident that those who encounter him see in Andrew a likeness to Sir Galahad, a courtly knight on a mission to free his lady. Joan Baez’s beautiful song, written for her sister Mimi following the death of her first husband in a motorcycle accident, tells of a bereaved lover returning gradually to life as a new future dawns. Baez’s lyrics reflect on the mutability of time, the unexpectedness of fate. As Mimi’s ‘Sir Galahad’ enters her bedroom secretly via the window, we might glimpse also the shadow of Andrew, dodging his way through the back gates of West Edge House.
6) Arpeggione Sonata arr. for flute and piano by Franz Schubert (Emmanuel Pahud/Eric le Sage)
Before an accident damaged the nerves in her left hand, Ewa Chaplin’s mother Serena was a promising flute player. There are two concerts in The Dollmaker in which a piece for flute and piano appears on the programme: one takes place at West Edge House, the other in the Ewa Chaplin story ‘Amber Furness’. In neither instance is the piece explicitly named, which leaves the choice of music up to the reader. Some might like to hear Schubert’s virtuoso theme and variations on ‘Trockne Blumen’ from his own song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin, but in my own head the work in question has always been the quieter, more mysterious arpeggione sonata in its arrangement for flute, a piece that puts me in mind of a lone figure walking along an empty road, somewhat in the manner of the traveller at the beginning of Winterreise.
This sonata was originally written for the arpeggione, a rare type of bass viol strung like a guitar but played like a cello. The piece was subsequently arranged for flute by James Galway and has become a concert standard. The mood evoked by the wind instrument is one of heartfelt yearning – Bramber observes one of the inmates of West Edge House being moved to tears by it. At the concert she attends with Anders Tessmond, Amber Furness finds the music mystifying and a little frightening. As the sonata plays itself out, Andrew pursues his knight’s quest along his lonely road.
7) Chromatic Fantasia by J. S. Bach (Maria Yudina)
Here is another piece that crops up in ‘The Elephant Girl’. Unable to sleep, Mila turns on the radio and hears a recording of the Russian pianist Maria Yudina. ‘She listened to Yudina playing Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and tried to imagine what it had been like, recording Bach’s music in a tiny basement studio while German soldiers poured over the border in a dull grey flood.’ Yudina in her basement studio, the war raging outside – these images swarm inside Mila’s head, echoing her anxiety and sense of confinement, her fears for her unborn child.
Yudina’s wartime broadcasts to a besieged Russia are justly famous as acts of resistance in the face of oppression. Again and again in The Dollmaker, music is portrayed as a catalyst, an incitement to action, an embodiment of desire or ambition. Listening to music, often seen as a passive act, might sometimes be better likened to demonic possession.
8) ‘Race to be King’ by Seth Lakeman
The idea for The Dollmaker first came to me more than a decade ago, when I was still living in the city of Exeter, in the county of Devon. The West Country was my home for almost twenty years. Its landscapes and atmosphere form a vital component of Andrew’s story, and Seth Lakeman’s ‘Race to be King’ instantly takes me back to the time when the original draft of the novel was written.
I worked for many years at a record store in Exeter, where we often hosted local bands for lunchtime gigs and signings. One such was Dartmoor fiddle player and songwriter Seth Lakeman, who was just beginning to make a name for himself with his energetic ballads and dance numbers based around West Country tunes and legends. In one of those mix-ups that sometimes happen, our local paper printed the wrong date and time for his in-store appearance, meaning that when Seth turned up to play he had an audience that consisted mainly of staff members and a few random customers who happened to be in the shop at the time. We were mortified, but Seth remained in good spirits, putting on a performance that was unforgettable in its intensity and all the more memorable for being especially for us.
Lakeman’s music frequently contain allusions to ghosts, hauntings, murders, pirates, smugglers and mysterious beasts – everything you might associate with West Country mythology. ‘Race to be King’ is actually a song about whale-hunting – that West Country maritime history again – but with its urgent rhythms and delusions of royalty it might have been written as a soundtrack for The Dollmaker. Its essential weirdness shines through, invoking the mysterious relationship between Andrew and the doll ‘Artist’, together with the Faustian bargain she offers him.
9) ‘Without You’ by Harry Nilsson
As Andrew finally enters the hamlet of Tarquin’s End, he hears music coming from the open window of one of the cottages: ‘a chart hit from the seventies that had been a secret favourite of [his] father’s.’ Originally released in 1969 by the ill-fated Welsh band Badfinger, ‘Without You’ as covered and reissued by Harry Nilsson became a worldwide hit in 1972 and constitutes one of my earliest musical memories.
Andrew’s father is a shadowy figure – we never even get to know his name – but in his attempts to understand his son and to maintain a relationship with him, we come to see him as a conservative yet essentially decent man, whose repressed sense of self might well have found expression through the tender, fragile lyrics and unforgettable melody of a favourite pop song.
Encountering the song again years later, Andrew remembers his father and hears an echo of his own emotional predicament.
10) ‘Satin Doll’ by Duke Ellington (Ella Fitzgerald)
This playlist wouldn’t be complete without a doll-themed number, so let’s play out with Ella Fitzgerald swinging this Duke Ellington standard. Chance meetings and unspoken greetings, a dance in the land of dolls may leave you with more unsolved mysteries than you bargained for...
Nina Allan and The Dollmaker links:
The Herald profile of the author
LiteratureWorks interview with the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
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