My Cultural Diet

“Charlotte Sometimes” is one of my all-time favorite Cure songs, an otherworldly pop tune as only Robert Smith and Co. could write. I’ve known for a long time that it was inspired by Penelope Farmer’s novel of the same name, just one of the many examples of Smith’s literary influences. (See also Albert Camus, Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, and Mervyn Peake.) However, I’d never actually read the book until my wife bought me a copy for my birthday. When Charlotte Makepeace arrives at her new boarding school, the last thing she expected was to suddenly wake up 40 years in the past with a different identity. As she leaps back and forth between past and present, and learns more about Clare, the girl with whom she trades places, Charlotte can feel her own identity slip and fade away. Read through a modern lens, Charlotte Sometimes might seem rather slight; there are no grand revelations and Farmer is completely uninterested in the actual time travel mechanics. But I loved Farmer’s prose, which could get quite surreal and abstract in keeping with Charlotte’s own increasingly fractured perspective. I can see why Robert Smith was so drawn to the book, and like any true Cure fan, I enjoyed identifying all of the lines that he lifted for his song’s lyrics.

I may earn an affiliate commission on items you buy through Opus. These commissions will go directly to support the site and my blogging.