The Song is You by Arthur Philips
The Song is You
Arthur Phillips
Duckworth, Paperback, 272 pp., ISBN 978 0 7156 3873 6, Price: £8.99
Janette Currie
A song is a magical time-travelling machine. The opening bars of a familiar melody can transport us across time and space, conjuring memories of Christmases-past, first loves, birthdays, weddings and funerals. In his fourth novel, The Song is You, Arthur Phillips enacts the melancholy of mourning through the random play list of an i-pod shuffle. The protagonist, Julian Donahue, is disconnected emotionally from the world. His infant son has died and his marriage has crumbled beneath the weight of unspoken grief. We follow Donahue’s deeply personal voyage from despair to hope, listening to “the world slowly reopening to him” through his headphones.
He tapped at his iPod, feeling within a note or two whether each random offering could provide what he was craving. Funk, punk, mope, pop, bop, hip-hop, swing, cool, acid house, Madchester, Belleville, New Orleans, Minneapolis white, Minneapolis black, Ivory Coast, Blue Nose groove, neo-baroque soundtrack, jam band, impressionism, hard-core, cowboy, crooner, rai, gypsy, tango, fox-trot, skip, skip skip, his temper rising, and then he felt it, just the opening chords, before he could have identified the musician or said that this was what he needed.
Donahue’s obsession with Cait O’Dwyer, a young, upcoming Irish musician, is the catalyst for his reawakening. He haunts her appearances, following her progress from bar room performance to international rock concert, taking on the role of fan, voyeur, stalker. Julian is a director of TV commercials but he behaves like a Svengali, leaving cartoon drawings on coasters and messages of encouragement on her web page. “He’d never done this—sat unnoticed and painlessly extracted a sample of a woman’s privacy, like a drop of blood pricked from a sleeping fingertip, to return to her later as a gift, cut and faceted and mounted, endowed with new and complex meanings.”
Cautiously, she responds and they begin to edge towards a relationship.
Neither mawkish nor syrupy Phillips’s sentimentality is gossamer light. At times achingly sad, the meandering, descriptive prose is also laced with touches of black humour. Particularly funny is Aidan’s (Julian’s elder brother) appearance on the TV game show, Jeopardy! (Phillips is five-times champion of the show).
The writing is engaging, witty and timed to perfection. The tempo quickens and slows, building emotion to a crescendo and waning gracefully. Characterisation is inventive. Phillips plays with the idea of stereotype: Julian is a reformed philanderer working in TV but he’s also sensitive; Alec Stamford is a failed rock star reinventing himself as an artist, treading the line “between drudging anonymity and unbecoming musical ambition”; Stan, the New York cop brought in to investigate the mysterious and creepy “Cartoon Man” is, according to his cousin Ian, a stereotypically intense lead guitar player in Cait’s band, “thoroughly-in-the-bone coppishness … a caricature”.
The Song is You is a novel preoccupied with the notion that Robert Burns memorably expressed in his poem ‘To a Louse’ (no, not ‘To a Mouse’) and succeeds in being Burnsian in scope and achievement. Philips skilfully pierces novelistic convention and pat stereotypes to reveal the pathos and humour of flawed humanity.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion – Robert Burns
