On my blog The Book Tuner, I match music to books – pairing those that provide complementary reading and listening experiences. In the wake of Questions of Travel winning the 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award, I've matched it with the perfect soundtrack.
Do the places we go become part of who we are? Michelle de Kretser’s novel uses the prism of travel to reflect how distance and proximity affect family relationships and emotional bonds or scars. In a similarly wandering spirit, each song on the 2011 album from Justin Vernon’s indie-folk band Bon Iver – dreamily, if repetitively, titled Bon Iver, Bon Iver – explores a sentiment inspired by a place.
In our globalised and hyperlinked world, travel can be a physical act or a virtual one. The separate journeys taken by Laura and Ravi in Questions of Travel – landing in London and Naples, Sydney and Sri Lanka, being involved with guidebooks and websites – are coloured by the emotional baggage they haul to each destination. Laura’s hurt is buried deeply in her past, while Ravi’s trauma unfolds before our eyes. De Kretser’s exquisitely crafted prose is the current that carries them along, guiding them through violent eddies and placid pools, with a bend in the river obscuring their fates until the final page.
Laura comes “to savour the brief minutes at the end of every journey when travel was over but arrival remained prospective”; while Ravi discovers that “behind the beguiling hypermodern façade of the web” is a “landscape littered with ruins”, which is “like wandering through a brand-new, labyrinthine mansion in which a door opened to reveal a grave”. The second half of the book, in particular, cleverly skewers Australia’s silent racism and troubled relationship with refugees, those people who travel for reasons other than pleasure.
Bon Iver, Bon Iver begins its travels in the isolated city of Perth, which Justin Vernon treats as a place of spiritual awakening or “birth" and ends with Beth/Rest, which evokes the timeless place of death, and whose 80s-inspired sound sets it apart from the rest of the album. A stand-out song is Holocene, a title that refers to both a bar in Portland and a geological era. A repeated line in the song, “Once I knew I was not magnificent," neatly captures the paradox of being human: there is a certain magnificence in knowing that we are not.
On this album, the music offers up the thrilling promise of travel, with guitars noodling dreamily and pounding military drums building a delicious anticipation. You could ride anywhere on that wave and become someone else in a place where nobody knows your name. But Vernon’s mournful minor-key voice keeps breaking in to deflate that dream. You can’t go anywhere without taking yourself, he reminds you. Reinvention is as fruitless a task as outrunning your shadow.
The physical act of travel brings with it unexpected connections. In Questions of Travel, these manifest in Laura’s bonds with the eccentric Theo or the ambitious Paul Hinkel, while in real life, such connections can be found in the rapturous audience responses to Bon Iver’s tour of Australia in 2012. Virtual travel joins dots of its own, allowing Ravi to spend time with his wife and son online, or my own web-trawling discovery that Bon Iver’s Perth was written after Vernon comforted a close friend of Heath Ledger in the wake of his death.
Michelle de Kretser and Bon Iver both depict our connections with family and friends as a spider’s web, sticky strands that tether us to one another – for good or ill – and which can be broken only by a force greater than ourselves. Whether you’re planning a trip to escape from your life or dreading a return home, Questions of Travel and Bon Iver, Bon Iver will make the journey more meaningful.
