Books with soundtracks: no, really, this one works…

Books with soundtracks. The idea is so glaringly obvious, and so obviously feeble, that I hesitate to write on it. The general reaction to the appearance of the Booktrack app last year was one of amused despair. This app offers, for what remains a small selection of books, a soundtrack made up of ambient noise, sound effects and music, that plays along with the text on your e-reader. Cleverly, it tracks the speed of your reading so as to produce the sound of that “wild scream of a terrified voice” (from the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Speckled Band) at just the right moment.

Of course, most people who read books read them because they’re books: words on a page that do you the honour of letting you imagine your own screams. Films, and audiobooks, do their own thing, and good luck to them.

So I was surprised at myself for thinking that I’d found a soundtrack to a book that actually worked. In fact, it’s the soundtrack to the film that, while not quite of the book in question, is intimately linked to it. The film: Patience (After Sebald) – reviewed here. The soundtrack: by British sound-collagist The Caretaker. The book: WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

The film, which I haven’t yet seen, is a poetic response to Sebald’s book, which starts out as the account of a walking tour of Suffolk, but soon mutates into a strange wandering history that feels able to move from the biology of the herring to the concentration camps of the last century, and thence onto peculiarities of local eccentrics, proceeding without reason, but with plenty of thematic rhyme. Its central point, made on the first page, is that “the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past,” are evident, even in the blandest, most ‘normal’ of locales.

For the soundtrack, The Caretaker (aka Leyland Kirby) samples, distorts and loops pieces of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey). No matter that Sebald’s walk took place in August, it is a perfect match: the melancholy of Schubert’s piano melodies suits Sebald’s mood absolutely. There are even touches of appropriately lugubrious humour in the way Kirby takes and shapes his extracts, as when the voice, slowed and slurred to a bloodhound drool, repeatedly attempts to come in, and is repeatedly cut off.

Formally, too, the snippets of old tunes echo the way Sebald famously drops uncaptioned photos, illustrations and postcards into the body of the text: you wouldn’t need to know this was Schubert (as I didn’t) to appreciate its kinship to the text.

But if Schubert is such a fine choice, why not just stick that on your CD or mp3 player when you pick the book up, rather than this eccentric appropriation of it? Well, the singing would be a distraction, for a start, whereas here the voice is largely absent, and warped to the point of abstraction when present. The melodies, too, are slowed, and slanted, to fit the pace of our eyes’ progress across the page; there’s a generous use of echo; and the music is often mixed down behind the hiss of the 78 record the Caretaker used.

That hiss, above all, is what makes this such a perfect accompaniment to the book. On a practical level it offers a white noise distraction from the world around you – it works brilliantly on headphones, and I’m guessing it would be ideal for public transport. In terms of meaning you could make it: the interference of time in our attempts to see and understand the past; the sound of sea on the shingle spit at Orford; the eternal loop of East Anglian rain…

Patience (After Sebald) by The Caretaker is released by History Always Favours The Winners

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