Opinion
Some books just sound better this way.
“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive”, the narrator, Richard Papen, discloses in Donna Tartt’s 1992 campus-thriller, The Secret History. I’m familiar with that line, and with many lines in The Secret History, because I listened obsessively to the audiobook, read by Tartt herself, during the COVID lockdowns.
The Secret History is a gothic novel about an exclusive group of Classics students at a university in Vermont and their adventures in Dionysian ritual and murder. Critic James Wood called it “swoonily compulsive”. Reading the book is a kind of Dionysian experience in its own right; its world of intellectual glamour, old money and verdant seclusion seems to intoxicate the author as much as the narrator and the intended reader. I first read it over one gloriously swoony weekend aged 17.
Many years later, it was the perfect audiobook as I stomped through the freezing streets of locked-down Melbourne. I listened to it over and over again. The book’s alternating modes of ecstatic surrender and wintry paranoia cast just the right vibe over things. I fell asleep to it many times, and picked it up the next day wherever the story landed.
The thing that struck me was the mordant humour in Tartt’s performance. I loved her cool, sardonic tone. It had a tempering effect on the book’s excesses.
The Secret History is not the only book I’ve listened to in this compulsive, repetitive way. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, read by actress Emma Messenger, is another book I listen to on repeat and in random fits and starts. In one sense, it’s “passive listening” because I’m usually doing something else at the same time. But I’ve listened to The House of Mirth so many times now that I’m familiar with Wharton’s text in a way that I would not be if I’d only read it once or twice in print.
Recently I’ve been re-listening to Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, translated by Polly Barton and read by voice artist Cindy Kay. It’s a strange book about a young Japanese woman working a series of meaningless temp jobs. The book explores the surreal aspects of modern workplaces – and there are subtle, unnerving touches of magic realism.
I’m hypnotised by the hushed, conspiratorial quality of Kay’s delivery, which brings out the comedy and absurdity of the story and highlights the narrator’s weird fixations. I’ve sometimes wondered if I’d have the patience for this book and its obsessions with workplace intrigues and minutiae if I read it in print.
Debates about whether or not audiobooks “count” as reading, and whether it’s “cheating” to listen to books have been going on since the option emerged in the 1930s. But I’m not sure I understand the point of the debate. These are two very different modes of encountering text – and each has its pros and cons. I know that I absorb more from books I read in print, because printed books demand my undivided attention. But professional readers can bring authenticity to regional accents – making characters sound like they’re supposed to sound – in a way I could never conjure myself. And they highlight dimensions of the text that I might have overlooked in print.
One audiobook that I have listened to only once is my own novel, The Confidence Woman. I drank a big glass of wine before I pressed play, just to take the edge off. It’s normal, I think, to have complicated feelings about your own book, but I soon relaxed into Maddy Withington’s dry, understated delivery. It’s a first-person novel, and Maddy captured the character’s voice and the humour really well.
I rang Maddy (who I’d never met) to find out about her own experiences listening to – and recording – audiobooks. She’s done a lot of both, as the voice behind many Australian works of fiction including Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane and The Brink by Holden Sheppard. Perhaps because of her low-key delivery of my own book, I was surprised to hear that she’s “very gestural” in the sound booth.
“I probably look insane, moving my hands around, sometimes knocking over mic stands,” she told me. “But it really does help with the performance.”
And it turned out that Maddy, like me, is a big fan of Tartt’s reading of The Secret History. “It’s the nuances she brings to the voices and it’s her comic timing,” she enthused. “The Secret History is a bombastic book. In the hands of someone else, it might not have had any subtlety across the reading at all.”
A professional endorsement of my own listening obsession? I’m all ears.
Sophie Quick is the author of The Confidence Woman