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May 15, 2020
Romesh Gunesekera's Playlist for His Novel "Suncatcher"
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.
Romesh Gunesekera's Suncatcher is a remarkable and moving coming of age novel that features an unforgettable protagonist.
Financial Times wrote of the book:
"As a coming-of-age novel, Suncatcher is memorable and sometimes brilliant in its ability to map the tensions between leader and follower, the arc and trajectory of boys trying so impatiently to become men. This is also a wise and poignant portrait of a country—Ceylon before it became Sri Lanka—caught in the moment before it loses its innocence."
In his own words, here is Romesh Gunesekera's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Suncatcher:
Most of my novels have a soundtrack but the tracks tend to be embedded deep in the text so that a reader may stumble across them as happy discoveries. Occasionally a song might be mentioned as a cultural marker, but I prefer not to use them as a shortcut to establish a mood or evoke an atmosphere. Rather than quoting lyrics, I try to find a rhyme or something that might remind the reader of a song which in turn might trigger something else — all just below the surface. Sometimes a song title does have the words I want in it, the right weight and sound: "Do Not Forsake Me" is the theme tune of the classic Western High Noon and one of the characters in my novel, The Sandglass, hums it at an opportune moment. A Jimi Hendrix fan would notice a homage to "Purple Haze" when Triton in my first novel, Reef, a world away from Hendrix, wants to kiss the sky. Both these have a bearing on my most recent novel Suncatcher: Kairo, the narrator, loves Westerns and the novel, like Reef, is set in the sixties — 1964, Sri Lanka aka Ceylon.
In Suncatcher, transistor radios play the Hit Parade from England. Hendrix had just recorded his first single with the Isley Brothers but it was not a record that reached Sri Lanka. The Beatles were the big thing for twelve-year old Kairo and he makes a fool of himself singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" while cycling on his own. There’s news of the Fab Four’s first film: A Hard Day’s Night, but Kairo is miffed he won’t get to see it for ages. Gerry & The Pacemakers play the theme tune to the book with their 1964 hit: "Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying." Kairo hears it, as we do in the pages, when he visits his teenage friend Jay who is mourning the death of a pet bird.
Kairo’s mother works for the only radio station in the country: Radio Ceylon. So, her life, and Kairo’s too, is often filled the voices of the famous crooners of the period: Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy David Jr. My own favourite song from that era is "Moon River" — best done by Audrey Hepburn. I try to smuggle it in by planting huckleberries on Jay’s uncle’s coconut estate trying to echo the song’s lovely line on huckleberry friends which in turn is a homage to Mark Twain. Jim Reeves, who died in 1964, gets a mention because he was always on the airwaves in Sri Lanka and even the milkshake man likes to sing his last hit: "Welcome to My World." In contrast, Jay’s urbane uncle is more likely to whistle something from Puccini’s Madame Butterfly or Tosca.
I didn’t need to listen to any of these while writing, except for the Gerry & The Pacemakers song — when I wanted to check out the actual lyrics. I prefer to write without any music besides the sound of the words in my head or the percussion of the keyboard. Any other rhythm or melody or lyric would simply get in the way. I enjoy music with almost everything else I do, but not with writing. I don’t mind noise and usually there is the noise of traffic, or planes in the sky (less now in the Covid-19 lock down) or, if I have found some special secluded place, the noise of leaves in trees, waves in the ocean, but all those I can fade by concentrating on the page; voices, words, arranged music is more difficult to keep at bay unless it is atonal or in a language I don’t understand. Mongolian throat music, Cantopop or the classic Bollywood singer Lata Mangeshkar works better than the Grateful Dead if I need to drown out distractions. It’s an odd reversal. Because when I started writing poems and stories as a youngster, fifty years ago, I could not imagine writing without music all around me, especially the songs of singer-songwriters: Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Phoebe Snow. Until I discovered the sublime world of J S Bach. The sound of music was essential to writing then. But that was tuning up. Now I let memory play the music.
Romesh Gunesekera is the author of Monkfish Moon, Reef, The Sandglass, The Match, and Noontide Toll. He grew up in Sri Lanka and the Philippines and now lives in London
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