Ian Forrest
the music
Music plays a central role in Shadow Guide, moving behind and between the pages and reflecting the action and mood as it changes along the story.
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Here is all the music featured in the text, with extracts from the novel to match. You are invited to listen to each piece in turn as you read the book - or just to enjoy them now in their own right.
Chapter 1 - The Assassin
Daniel Dénécheau - Valse des Chevaux de Bois
Grivemusicienne
Somewhere up the street an accordion was playing a tune she didn’t know. A sad tune; slow, rhythmical dance music… Just marionettes dancing to the same music throughout time, acting out the same movements and thoughts, moving to the same, unchangeable score. And she was one of them; she had been there last time, always had been; a face in any photo someone had chanced to take. She would always be there; a face at a window.
Chapter 8 - Deliverance: I
Frédéric Chopin - Nocturne in C Sharp Minor
Bruce Liu
She breathed in, once. Her hands stretched and she found the first chord. And then her fingers moved without thought, along a course as natural as thinking. Thoughts thought before, but ever different, ever fluid, ever the same. Her fingers ached with the song running through them, taught to them over and over as they stumbled, so that now they wouldn’t; so that now her mind could sing. The music yearned to be shouted; it was a lover’s murmur in her ear; whispered words, too bitter for one heart to bear their sweetness.
Chapter 15 - We're Here Because We're Here
We're Here Because We're Here
British soldiers' song, 1914-1918
There must be a party coming up the communication trench. They were singing. The tune was Auld Lang Syne. ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot…’ But those were not the words. The words were the answer to an unvoiced question. ‘We’re here because, we’re here because, we’re here because we’re here, We’re here because, we’re here because, we’re here because we’re here.’ The song was faint, but that or the coming daylight roused the boy. His voice was just a whisper now. ‘I want to go home.’
Chapter 27 - The Australians
Jaromir Vejvoda - Rosamunde
Street organStreet organ
Peter woke to the sound of horseshoes on cobbled stones. The iron-framed bed was bouncy but comfortable and everything smelled of starch and new laundry. He opened the window and let in the outside smell that was slowly becoming normal; the scent of coal smoke, tinged with horses. Across the street, a man in a waistcoat and shapeless hat turned the wheel of a barrel organ, filling the air with shrill, breathy music.
Chapter 34 - Jasmine
J.S Bach - The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1, Prelude
Vadim Chaimovich
He continued speaking as he played. ‘And, immediately… something mysterious happens… Bach sends us a message… he is taking us on a journey… a familiar journey… which we don’t understand… which we can’t understand… which is without measure… but we trust him… we must trust him… each step takes us forward… and we know… what that step must be… but still it surprises us… delights us… saddens us… because we know… it is beyond us… and we know… that we could never have written this… because even Bach… could never have written this… he merely opens a window… a little… and light comes flooding in… and now… right here… we realise that the journey… will take us back… back to the beginning… somehow… like the perfect circle… and then… and then… before we quite arrive… it widens out into great spreading arches… filling whole bars… like this… and we realise that Bach… is showing us… the universe entire… and all things that were wrong… have been put to rights… and all journeys… however difficult… will end well… and so he brings us… safely… back… home.’ There was silence and their eyes met. ‘Play me Beethoven,’ said Jasmine.
Ludwig Van Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp Minor, mov. 3
Rudolf Buchbinder
…there was a brief pause before his fingers exploded into the keyboard. They hit somewhere in the middle and ran straight to the top, then back down again. The sound swelled and echoed through the room like perfectly crafted thunder, in great cascades of pure emotion. The energy was relentless and Jack rode it as brazenly as he rode Rheingold, but with greater assurance, now rising slightly from his seat as he threw his full weight into a series of massive chords, choked with the fury and despair of a man who knew he would never hear the notes he was writing.
Then suddenly, the storm subsided and became silence; and from the air that it left, a melody built and rose, so pure and so light that it seemed impossible it could have come from the same pen that had written the thunder. Here stood a man, calmly contemplating the position he was in, that everyone is in, with all its joy, its sadness and its infinite possibilities. The theme expanded and it explored and it turned quietly around upon itself until, finally, it approached a resolution. Beethoven, in all his abject, human misery had found an answer, of sorts.
Ludwig Van Beethoven - Piano Concerto no. 5 in E-Flat Major, mov. 3
Krystian Zimerman
Chapter 42 - Poor Wandering One
Scott Joplin - Sugar Cane Rag
Cory Hall
…since he had made light of it, nobody was expecting what came next, which was a flawless rendition of the latest music from America; syncopated, dynamic and relentlessly beautiful. Jack filled the room with the sounds of things to come, and they sounded exciting.
Gilbert and Sullivan - Poor Wandering One
Linda Ronstadt
It wasn’t really a comic song at all, it was a love song, both coy and flirtatious. Whether it was happy or sad was hard to say, but Peter thought it must be a joy to sing it. It was a lilting song of forgiveness and desperate longing.
Chapter 46 - Winter
Franz Shubert - Ave Maria
Barbara Bonney
The end of the garden and the tennis court were under water, and still the rain went on. Guy Fawkes Night was a wash-out and fires were set every day in the hearths of Hartford House. The sun had become a stranger; the winter had hardly begun but it seemed it would go on forever. All colour had seeped from the world. Why her? Why couldn’t it be him?
Chapter 49 - Deliverance: V
John Sullivan Dwight - O Holy Night
Carrie Underwood
In the cold beyond the window, the snow came down in silence. Great mystical flakes, dancing from invisible clouds; down and down they came, into the light from the house, then whispering softly into the carpet of their sisters. Shipwrecked in a strange land, she had made it her home as well as any Robinson Crusoe. There was work still to do, but now, on Christmas Eve, she would burst forth. Emma was waiting, suppressing the urge to break their secret, and her father pretending not to guess it. Together they would hatch it out, she on the piano and the voice of her daughter singing ‘O Holy Night’. And Jack would bellow ‘Bravo!’, and Helena would clap the baby’s hands together on her lap, and Maud Golding would hug and lavish praise on her granddaughter as only a grandmother can, and Little Jack would run around to find attention, and she would laugh, and all things past and all things yet to come would be of less importance, compared to this one, eternal moment, than a quickly flitting shadow on a field of snow.