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December 8, 2022
Graeme Macrae Burnet's Playlist for His Novel "Case Study"
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.
Graeme Macrae Burnet's novel Case Study is brilliantly told, a riveting exploration of identity.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have ... Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades."
In his own words, here is Graeme Macrae Burnet's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Case Study:
My latest novel Case Study is set in London in 1965. It concerns an unworldly young woman who believes that a charismatic, radical psychotherapist called Collins Braithwaite has driven her sister to suicide.
1. Vertigo Suite – Bernard Herrmann
To my mind Bernard Herrmann is the greatest composer of film scores. His Suite for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo comes closer than anything else to describing the mental landscape of Case Study. There is a strong sense of events spiralling out of control and of a descent into madness. It also just a beautiful, mysterious and dramatic piece of music.
2. Chopin - Nocturne in C Sharp Minor (No. 20)
Our nameless protagonist prefers Chopin to the Rolling Stones (in fact she probably doesn’t know who The Rolling Stone are). Perhaps when she walks alone in the dark of Primrose Hill, it would be this haunting nocturne that is playing in her head. There’s a sense of the unknown here, and crucially for the character a brittleness: the sense that at any moment, everything might crack and fall apart.
3. "Downtown" – Petula Clark
Released in 1964, I love everything about this song: the opening piano hook, Petula Clark’s diction, the school band percussion, and above all the melody and lyrics. It’s hard to believe this isn’t a Burt Bacharach song, especially when the brass break kicks in, but it was written by prolific British songwriter and producer Tony Hatch, (who incidentally later went on to co-write the theme song for the Australian soap opera Neighbours). But aside from being a brilliant song, precisely of the period of Case Study, it’s song about being on the outside looking in. There is the feeling here that life is elsewhere, in the place called Downtown, and that this is the place to go escape one’s loneliness, or perhaps even to escape from one’s self.
4. Georgy Girl – The Seekers
I’m cheating a tiny bit as "Georgy Girl," the theme song from the film of the same name wasn’t released until 1966, but like "Downtown" it’s about a young woman looking in at the bright lights of swinging London from the outside. And like The Great Pretender (see below), it’s also about liberating and reinventing one’s self.
The lines: “Don't be so scared of changing and rearranging yourself/It's time for jumping down from the shelf a little bit” could be a manifesto for our nameless protagonist as she reinvents herself in the guise of her more glamorous alter-ego, Rebecca Smyth (“with a Y”)
5. "(Whatever It Is) I’m Against It" – Grouch Marx
Groucho croons this hymn to kneejerk oppositionalism in Horse Feathers. Its lyrics sum up everything about Collins Braithwaite’s intellectual position:
I don't know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I'm against it
No matter what it is or who commenced it
I'm against it
If Braithwaite was a country, this would be the national anthem.
6. "Unchained Melody" - Righteous Brothers
There’s a scene in Case Study in which our young heroine reluctantly dances with her cousin to a jukebox song in a seaside town café. I wanted to use ""Unchained Melody" because the line ‘I’ve hungered for your touch’ is so full of longing and understated eroticism. The scene takes place in the late 1950s, by which time recordings by Jimmy Young and Al Hibbler of "Unchained Melody had already been No.1 and No.2 the UK charts. Neither of these versions have the soaring, heart-breaking quality of the Righteous Brothers version which was not released until 1965, and is by far the best-known version of the song. I could still have used the song in the scene, but as it was really The Righteous Brothers version I had in mind, I decided not to. I include it here though, as it encapsulates the longing for the physical touch of another human being for which I think my heroine yearns.
7. "The Great Pretender – The Platters
So I needed another song for this scene. I thought about "Dream Lover" by Bobby Darin – a well-known song with a theme of fantasy unfulfilled, but in the end I opted for The Platters’ "The Great Pretender" released in 1955. In Case Study the two central characters are united by the fact that have adopted a (false) persona in order to present themselves in a certain way to the world – to be someone else .The lyrics of the song (“I seem to be what I’m not, you see”) perfectly encapsulate this idea. It’s also a great song which I could imagine two teenagers awkwardly dancing to in a café c.1958.
8. Theme from Blow Up – Herbie Hancock
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up is the classic film of the Swinging Sixties era. In reality, the London of the time was swinging for a tiny minority of people, but this was the London of the counter-culture – the London of Collins Braithwaite and this track sums up the free-wheeling iconoclastic vibe of the period. Yeah baby!
Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of the 'fiendishly readable' His Bloody Project, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It won the Saltire Prize for Fiction and has been published to great acclaim in twenty languages around the world.
His latest novel, Case Study has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) has called it 'a novel of mind-bending brilliance.'
He is also the author of The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau and The Accident on the A35 both set in the unremarkable town of Saint-Louis in the Alsace and featuring the downtrodden Inspector Georges Gorski.
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