A sudden, severe eye infection had sidelined me. It rendered my eyes painfully photo-sensitive. The sunlight was excruciating. So, too, screens for more than a minute or so. This meant no dog walking. No TV. No writing. No reading.
I was relegated to the sofa, my eyes shut behind sunglasses, the dogs curled lovingly though filled with uncertainty (Will he ever walk us again?) at my feet. I wanted to say, “Read to me, please.” Once, a friend or family member might’ve done so. Adults reading to one another as well as to their children at bedtime was not so extraordinary once. But there was just me and the dogs … and vast options for auditory entertainment.
I went for the audiobook of a novel, Any Human Heart by William Boyd. I’ve read the book many times, first in London when it was released in 2002. I wanted something familiar, a comforting “rereading”, if that’s what listening to someone read a book you think you know inside-out might amount to. Boyd’s character, Logan Mountstuart, has stayed with me. I knew him intimately (so I believed) and some of the topography over which his life – narrated in first-person diary entries – eventfully unfolded.
But, listening to the audiobook, largely in darkness over several days, was such a vastly different experience to reading the novel yet again, I might have been experiencing a completely different story.
Whenever I’ve reread this novel my inner voice has become Mountstuart’s. I’ve heard his voice as mine, as if he’s somehow inhabited something of me. This is partly a measure of compelling prose writing and, I believe, testimony to the potency – when cadence and tone are spot-on – of first-person narration. More simply, it is just what happens when the words of others meld with our inner beings. It’s the mysterious psycho-emotional alchemy of reading.
But through audio emerged another Mounstuart to the one my inner voice clung to. He spoke differently. He looked unlike the character I knew from two decades’ readings. A reader’s memory is fallible. They will forget various character traits and quirks, plot nuances. So much else emerged for me, however, in listening to Any Human Heart to complement my many passes at the novel that I had to question my acuity as a reader.
Indeed, whole episodes of Mounstuart’s life I’d forgotten or skimmed – poignant, whimsical, darkly humorous – were revealed to me. It was as if I had never read some of them at all, and the character familiar to me for so long had been rewritten or somehow amended.
Of course, the audiobooks of fiction speak the same words as the novel. The voice of the narrator and some external sounds – usually music – drive the narrative externally, aurally, for the listener. Perhaps the act of reading a book like this – or any other – can become so immersive, almost meditative, that our inner narrator is unimpressed with some details in a way that is enhanced and emphasised in audio through an emphatic change of cadence or with the addition of music or other sounds.
I am a slow but obsessive reader. I like to halt and admire the architecture of sentences, to stop, reverse and reread beautiful passages and sometimes whole chapters. I like to read early in the mornings when my mind is fresh and more alert.
I now know, more than ever, how imperfect I am as a reader. But I also see the possibility of how the audiobook of a novel I love can make me a better one.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
