Music Monday is a weekly meme hosted by the Total Book Geek. The purpose of this bookish variant is to match a book with a particular song; whether it is character defining, a narrative element, or just an overall book defining track.

So why am I doing this? Well if I had to choose to only have one of the five traditional senses, it would be sound perception above all else. And hey I think it’d be neat to share music I listen to on a daily basis!

This Week’s Song:
Dark – Luke Sital-Singh

Book Selected:
A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness

Initial Thoughts:

This is a companion post to the review of review of A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. If you haven’t read the book, well, I think you should…so you shouldn’t read any further into this post to save yourself from potential spoilers that I may or may not guarantee will be in this post. But you can surely listen to the song! (I sure hope the track plays cause there was no embed button so I adapted one from the general format).

But first off: I’d like to thank Suits for introducing this song to me. The piano track and the vocal work make me feel all the feels again—both in Suits and A Monster Calls.

The argument that I’m going to make is that the monster is internal to Conor and is his conscience by extension. Whether or not you believe this is by your own accord.

The lyrics are essentially homage to the relationship (except not really a relationship) between Conor and the monster. Conor is simply a boy with his own struggles trying to make ends meet in a shitty world. His mother is dying, his dad is off doing whatever in America, and he almost has no friends, almost. But he has the monster, so that counts for something, right? Metaphysically, the conscience is part of one’s fiber of being; living and breathing, and very much part of the intricacies of what thought involves. Each verse calls out the monster (or the conscience) for what it is compared to everything in the world that should be very easy to understand. The grass is green; the sky is blue—but what if it isn’t true, what if there’s something…more?

Let’s look at the lyrics a bit.

Life is simple but thought is complex and we doubt ourselves all fucking day long. The answers are all around us, seemingly right in our faces, but we still think otherwise—it can’t be that easy, can it? Instead of the usual theme of “life being full of darkness and where we want (or need) to seek out light” in songs, this is the opposite, and it’s the pit-in-our-gut feeling that some things will always be awry. But it’s the lines in bold which highlights so much of A Monster Calls with so little in substance. Everyone has called out their own monster on their own terms; whether or not you believe it is up to you.

Excerpt from Dark:

You are the deepening mystery
When life is full of simplicity
You are the nagging doubt
The hideaway doubter
When everyone believes, everyone believes.

You are the abstract art of paint and poem
When our propaganda makes everything clear
You are the thirsty throat, the desert defeat
When there’s water everywhere

You are dark, you are dark, you are dark (x)
When all is bright

You are the silence the god gone missing
When the din of all belief is deafening
You are the stranger in the nighttime
Throwing us to the ground
When all we wanna do is getaway

[Song taken from Soundcloud (re: Raygun Records)]

Afterthoughts:

I hope you enjoyed another week of music from my playlist—this song is quite rad! Now maybe I’ll proceed into book two of Chaos Walking. Ness is the man (well…sometimes).

Cheers,
Joey