Reflections between literature and music

Penelope Farmer – Charlotte Sometimes (1969, Italian edition published in 2024 by Agenzia Alcatraz)

I've listened for years to "Charlotte Sometimes" by the Cure, and for years I never stopped wondering what the novel that inspired Robert Smith to write what I consider the Cure's most enchanting song could be like. To find out, I had to wait until just a few months ago, when the first Italian translation providentially arrived, courtesy of the ever-valuable Agenzia Alcatraz. The author, Penelope Farmer, was born on 14 June 1939 in Westerham, Kent, and is particularly well known in her home country for her children's books. However, she has also written for adults, often drawing on her interest in fantasy literature. "Charlotte Sometimes" (published in 1969) is her most famous book, and it's the very one that a ten-year-old Robert Smith read, becoming captivated by its gothic, crepuscular atmosphere to the point of being inspired to write his band's famous single.

The novel's protagonist is a young girl named Charlotte Makepeace. She arrives at boarding school in 1958, falls asleep in the dormitory, and wakes up in 1918. There's a war going on, her classmates are completely different, and everyone calls her Clare. But that's not all. The following morning, Charlotte finds she's back in her own time. The morning after that, she's back in 1918 again.

After a few days spent switching between past and present, Charlotte increasingly realizes that she's swapping places with Clare. Since Charlotte is new to the school, no one knows her, and no one notices that she's taking Clare's place. But Clare's sister, Emily, immediately understands that Charlotte isn't Clare and demands to know what's going on. Charlotte doesn't know herself; the best she can imagine is that it has something to do with the bed she and Clare share. The problem arises when Charlotte, during one of her visits to 1918, is moved out of the dormitory into a new bed. Without that bed, Charlotte can't return to her own era. From here unfolds a series of increasingly bizarre events that will lead the girl to question her own identity.

"Charlotte Sometimes" is a novel that treats time travel as a metaphor for identity confusion, for the feeling of losing touch with oneself. It's a book that delves deep into the fears of adolescence, when personality is still taking shape, in that in-between land between childhood and adult life, where the pull of fantasy is increasingly giving way to the harshness of real life. It's a journey that is at once murky and enchanted.

Colonna sonora: The Cure – Charlotte Sometimes/ Splintered In The Head (1981)

Robert Smith had the brilliant ability to condense every sensation of the novel into little more than four minutes. The lyrics perfectly capture Charlotte's confusion, her visions, her curiosity, emotions, fears, her sense of being lost between two eras. Knowing nothing about the novel, us young first- and second-generation fans imagined Charlotte as one of the many introverted, black-clad girls with wild hair who so fascinated us. Reading the book, you realize the truth was something else entirely, but the dark allure remains intact.

The same goes for the sound of this extraordinary song: dreamy, romantic goth-dream rock that stands as a sort of anomaly wedged between the anguish of "Faith" and "Pornography". Few also know that the band was one of the rare acts to release a concept 7-inch single. The B-side of the single is in fact also inspired by Penelope Farmer's novel. "Splintered In The Head" opens instrumentally before Smith's tortured, echoing vocals enter the mix, representing Charlotte's restless visions. Two tracks that evoke a continuous digging into the self, a brooding introspection that made us feel part of a kind of crumbling human circle. But sharing our troubles with whichever Charlotte happened to be around (there was at least one in every class, in every high school) would have been wonderful all the same.

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