Theatre of the mind: How audio is changing the way we use books – and the way they are being written

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You ever tried to read the Evening Standard on the tube at rush hour? Just opening it is a major challenge given that one of your hands is attached to a pole or a strap. And even if you do get it open you are going to annoy one or other of three of four people who don’t fancy having a newspaper shoved in their face. And something similar applies to reading Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: the hardback in particular could do someone a nasty injury in the event of a sudden stop or start. All my problems were solved this week, and the commute became a pleasure and a font of information and enlightenment rather than the usual hell, when I finally swapped the written text for headphones, blocked out the noise, and tuned in to an audio book and NOA (News Over Audio).

At Baker Street underground station, conducting a scientific test, I pressed play on Six Stories. I found I could get all the way to Hackney Central, via King’s Cross and Highbury and Islington, up and down escalators, not at any point far from the madding crowd, and yet, simultaneously, remain glued to the aural page, courtesy of Matt Wesolowski’s riveting tale. I know a guy in Cambridge who walks around town with his head in a book. I presume the book changes from time to time, I don’t know, I never asked him. I reckon it’s pushing your luck. But now try that on the Northern Line, mate, and see what happens. Somebody ought to buy him headphones for Christmas and a subscription to Audible. It’s the only way to travel.

“We are living through a golden age of audio,” said Rachel Mallender. She used to be a producer at the BBC, on Radio 1, now she’s head of audio books at HarperCollins. You have to tip the hat to HarperCollins: all publishers are at it, of course, but they are the only publisher so far as I know who have a “total audio policy”, which is to say that all of their books will also be released on audio. “A large percentage of people use audio books to relax,” Mallender told me. “It’s the theatre of the mind. If you’re rushing around, and stressed, this gives you the chance to switch off. And it’s an opportunity to not look at a screen for a change.”

I know what she means. Marshall McLuhan says that radio is a “hot” medium, more emotional than the “cold” medium of television. And listening to audio on your headphones is even more of an intimate experience. The narrator is speaking directly to you and no one else. I was reminded of two early childhood experiences. One was Listen with Mother: “Are you sitting comfortably, children? Then I’ll begin…” The other was bedtime stories. It was like listening to a lullaby (even when, as in Six Stories, bad things were happening).

I resisted the largely interior monologue of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine for a while, but then I admit I surrendered and fell in love. With the narrator. So I phoned her up. I just wanted to listen to her voice some more. Her name is Cathleen McCarron and she lives in Stratford-on-Avon, where she is “Voice Coach” at the RSC (“I don’t work with Will.i.am”). She was born in Edinburgh and has a lilting Scottish accent, which speaks to me of steaming bowls of porridge, Highland Games, and leaping salmon, with just a dash of Rebus. But she can do any accent under the sun. For Eleanor Oliphant, she had to tone down her “rhoticity” (the rolling of the r) and use longer a’s (as in “bath” and “path”) and elongate her monophones (in “won’t” and “don’t”). But it’s a hybrid, and deliberately hard to locate, because she wanted to get a mix of London and Scotland in there. McCarron trained as an actor in Glasgow, but then took an MA in “Voice Studies” at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She got into audio books when someone fell ill and they needed a good Scottish accent. She has a new one coming out this week, Bring Me Back (by BA Paris) even while she is masterminding accents in The Duchess of Malfi.

In My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins says “an Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” Cathleen McCarron isn’t like that. She wants everyone to have “their own voice” and not have to sound like someone else. She embraces “”dissonance” and “diversity of accent”. She refuses to despise. “Every accent is valid.” The point of Eleanor Oliphant, she says, is the “disparity between how she appears on the outside and what she’s like on the inside.” There are certain physical tricks you can play to sustain a voice that is not your own. To do the protagonist, “I found it helped me to keep my mouth small, not very open. So she sounds self-contained.” To come up with another character, Raymond, she had to smile more and tap her hand on her chest “to feel the vibrations”. No wonder she won a US Audiofile Earphones Award.

I actually saw Leighton Pugh in the flesh. I could see him through this little window into the cubicle where he was recording Andrew Taylor’s historical novel, Fire Court, at ID Audio in north London. I was knocked out by this guy. He is a voice virtuoso. A real one-man band. He can flip in an instant from upper-crust Lady Somebody, to an old man with a “bit of the ague”, to a woman who is basically cockney but with upwardly mobile aspirations and apt to slip in a bit of French (“effroyable”). And the weird thing is, even though he’s sitting there, looking at his e-reader on a pedestal, his whole body seems to metamorphose and for a moment he is incarnating yet another one of a cast of thousands. But the mark of the true voice artist is this: he can say, “Chapter 19”, and you’re still hooked.

I was taken right back by the sight at the studio of a trusty old Quad amp, with actual valves, still going strong. Other than that, everything changes. It used to be the Sony Walkman and a cassette of The Smiths. And books had to be abridged. You just couldn’t get that much on a CD. Digital changed all that. Now I can listen to the whole of War and Peace if I feel like it. Patch Macquaid, director of ID Audio, said, “People used to go around saying, ‘This is the death of the book!’ Now it’s all about having more choice.” And it’s true. There are something like 4 million podcasts and rising. I can stream books on Storytell. And at the same time I still like to feel a real book in my hands. There is no real incompatibility between audio and text.

But I suspect that there is a shift in the zeitgeist and in the structure of literary language. The Eleanor Oliphant book sounds like a woman speaking to herself, not even quite a diary in the manner of Bridget Jones. It’s more oral than that. Or even, if possible, pre-oral, more of a stream of consciousness. More radically still – and entirely contemporary – Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories, and the sequel, Hydra, that I have just started listening to, incorporate the form of the podcast. Each book is written as if they were recordings of voices, which of course is exactly what they are if you are listening to them on audio. But these books are modelled on a medium other than books. Just as some books used to be cinematic, using “cuts” and “zooms”, now we have a book that explicitly refers to iTunes and listeners and whose resolution depends on subtle tweaks to a voice. Leighton Pugh gets into this one too, but just for once – and at much greater expense – several other voices can be heard, giving it still greater authenticity.

“Yeah, I structured it very similar to Serial, which was the first big, episodic true crime podcast I got into,” said Wesolowski, who lives in Newcastle. “I liked how the interviews were inter-spliced with narration and wondered if it would work in book form. I also liked how each episode focused on someone different. It was definitely a new way of writing for me, I didn’t even know if it would work or not!” Matt, it works. It’s not the end of the book, but the text is becoming aural or audiofiled, even before it gets recorded. It’s possible the age of the text is, if not over, at least entering the twilight zone.

Think back to, for example, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Over a million words. I bet you can get it as an audio book. But it was written partly as a homage to the written text. So quintessentially bookish. Which is why it is beloved of academics the world over. It’s written and read by bookworms. The Proustian philosophy is that the book will save you. You have an experience the first time around that is purely oral and spontaneous. Hence (thinking of the shortest sentence in the book) Zut! But you change it into art by writing it down and turning it into complex sentences – too long to quote here – with more embedded clauses that anyone could conceivably utter and still make sense of (it’s marginal even on the page).

Now the whole culture – the “Gutenberg galaxy” in McLuhan’s phrase – is going more oral/aural and the book reflects that shift by relying less on logic and more on a dialogic. Or, as one of the narrators in Six Stories says, “I don’t like silence.” So you can have sentences (which you’re not going to find in Proust) like this one: “Then the shit storm descended. Oh terribly sorry… am I allowed to swear on this?”

By the same token, I’m hoping that you are not reading this article, but rather listening to it. Which would be all thanks to NOA, News Over Audio. Set up in Ireland by a couple of young men, Gareth Hickey (26) and Shane Ennis (27), they’re already hooked up with not just The Independent, but the Financial Times and The Irish Times. I had quick chat with them in the Pret at High Street Kensington Tube station in between cracking massive global deals with other media companies in the US and Asia (them that is, rather than me). They’re a great double act, something like Ant and Dec, only younger, with Irish accents. And a truly evangelical passion. “We’re trying to counter Facebook and Twitter,” they say. They note that a huge percentage of the articles that get RT’d don’t really get read. NOA is a way of fully “engaging” with “serious journalism”. They envisage a world in which students are absorbing current affairs (in several languages) through their headphones and financiers are wheeling and dealing thanks to the latest insights – or rather soundbites – from Josie Cox (or whoever). “Even when you’re on the go you can still listen. It’s more convenient and it’s more natural”, they say. But one thing they stress is a news story is above all a story: their most popular audios have a decent narrative and strong characters.

The oral preceded the text by around 100,000 years or so. And it will still be around when the text is sitting only on the shelves of ancient libraries. It’s easier if you’re dyslexic (or illiterate) and it leaves your hands free. Then again, there are some voices that are more “engaging” than others. I had to ask Cathleen McCarron what she thought about the Prime Minister’s voice. “Her voice is the least of her worries,” she said.

Andy Martin is the author of ‘Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me’ and teaches at the University of Cambridge