It wouldn’t take a huge leap of imagination to assume that life as a doctor is tiring. Especially life as a doctor in Ireland’s largest children’s hospital. But when Colin Black finished recording the audiobook of his medical memoir, Gas Man, his overriding memory was how exhausting the process was.
Compared with his “real” job as consultant paediatric anaesthesiologist at Crumlin, the experience of reading aloud his own book in a recording studio was shockingly draining. “My job is mentally taxing, but only for very short bursts throughout the day. You know, there’s downtime between all those bursts of super concentration.”
While admitting that “there’s no terrible repercussions for losing concentration when you’re reading an audiobook”, it nevertheless surprised Black how exhausted he was after a day in front of a microphone.
It wasn’t the only surprising thing. After sending out the manuscript for Gas Man a couple of years ago, he received a number of offers from big publishing houses. The reason he signed with HarperCollins, he says, was because they guaranteed him an audiobook. There was never any talk of anyone else narrating; with this type of personal story it’s always better to have the author read it, Black was assured.
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When it came time to record he asked whether he’d be sent on some sort of narration course or assigned a dialect coach. “Surely there’s someone who’s going to teach me how to do this properly?” The reply, loaded with an unnerving confidence in his vocal abilities, was simply, “No, no. We’ll just book you some studio time and you head in there and read your book.”
What makes a good narrator?
There’s an old BBC interview with Michael Caine where he’s describing an experience he had as a young actor. The scene called for him to act drunk, so naturally when the cameras started rolling he acted drunk. The producer pulled him aside and gave him some advice. “You’re an actor who’s trying to walk crooked and talk slurred. A drunk is a man trying to walk straight and talk properly.” From that sharp little insight, Caine realised, “if the audience is sitting there saying, ‘Oh, isn’t Michael Caine a wonderful actor,’ then I’ve done it all wrong.”
Anyone who has ever listened to an audiobook with poor narration knows how true this sentiment is. Audiobook narration is a subtle and hugely underappreciated art form. To facilitate and bring to life a story, without distracting the listener by the performance itself, is a remarkable skill. Consider this: Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett, is a wonderful book. Meryl Streep is an incredible actor. So wouldn’t Streep reading Tom Lake be a slam dunk? That depends on how distracted you are by having one of the most famous people on the planet read you a story that might otherwise feel more intimate.
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The question of what makes a “good” audiobook narrator is a lot more complicated than it initially appears. These things are entirely subjective, and the very question of a narrator’s ability is often used as an argument to denigrate audiobooks as a whole. Terrible narration can ruin a great book, we’re told. But the inverse is also true: an excellent narrator can elevate a mediocre story.
If you have ever sat in a pub while a naturally gifted storyteller regales those around the table with a raucous retelling of a familiar tale, you’ll notice how the listeners hang on every word. They laugh at the right moments, remain silent at others, and you just know if you were to tell the same anecdote you’d bore the same people into finishing their drinks twice as quickly. It takes no small amount of talent to tell a story out loud.
For Noel Storey, an audio engineer who is also managing director of Beacon Studios (where Colin Black recorded Gas Man), the key to good narration is preparation. This involves reading aloud the book in question two or even three times beforehand. You could have the finest voice actor in the world sitting in the studio, but “unless they do the research and do the homework, it’s going to be a very, very lengthy job”.
For a good reader, says Storey, three hours in front of the microphone produces one hour of finished audio, on average. He uses the “punch and roll” recording technique, where a mistake is easily deleted and they can quickly drop back into the previous sentence. In this sense it’s live, “like a stage performance”.
From a technical point of view this process has two obvious benefits. First, it makes the post-recording editing a lot less painful, as most of the mistakes have already been removed. Second, “the actor will have picked up on the tune of the previous sentence”, so from a listener’s point of view the entire thing sounds seamless.
It’s all in the detail
Aoife McMahon is one of Ireland’s most in-demand audiobook narrators. She has recorded more than 200 titles, including best-sellers by Marian Keyes, Sally Rooney, Jo Spain and Colm Tóibín. If you listen to audiobooks, chances are you’ve heard her voice.
If Colin Black was surprised by the physical and mental toll of reading aloud for hours on end, McMahon has come to expect it. It is an unusual sort of stillness. Our bodies aren’t used to it, let alone our minds or vocal cords. “I always do a yoga practice and a voice warm-up before I begin,” she says. This is on top of the sort of preparation Noel Storey describes.
In her research phase she reads – or, more accurately, studies – the manuscript, looking for clues. The obvious things first – where is a character from? Do they have an accent? What age are they? – but subtler hints, too: have they travelled? Have they been to university? How might their physical attributes affect how they might sound?
She annotates the pages of the manuscript on her iPad to help her narrate the story smoothly, her marks letting her know if the next bit of dialogue is whispered or said with a laugh, for example. She echoes Storey’s sentiment that it’s akin to a stage performance, comparing it to a one-woman show with 40 characters.
Her research also involves considerations most listeners will never have thought of. Take a crime mystery: you have to read this kind of book forensically beforehand, McMahon says, “because there are so many twists and turns, and there could be text messages or letters from somebody you think is one person but turns out to be another”.
It’s a point that highlights the difference between reading for yourself and reading for an audience. If the killer sends what is supposed to be an anonymous message, it poses no problem as words on a page. In your own head you have only your own voice. But a narrator has to walk a fine line in moments like this, lest they unintentionally give the game away.
A tale as old as time
Why have audiobooks become so popular over the past decade? An obvious answer would be ease of access. Advances in technology and subscription services mean we can walk around with full digital libraries in our pockets at a fraction of what it used to cost.
Gone are the days of ponying up £70 for a 10-CD retelling of Jane Eyre the entire family was duty-bound to sit through. All tastes are accounted for. Almost anything is available with just a few swipes of a screen. But what if technology wasn’t really the answer? What if our phones and tablets simply facilitated a deeper desire?
One person who could explore these questions with more authority than most is Roy McMillan, an award-winning audiobook producer at Penguin Random House in the UK and narrator of hundreds of audiobooks. He acknowledges the role technology has played in the explosion of the audiobook industry, but he also believes that other, much deeper factors are at play. At the heart of it all, though, is the narrator.
He regards audiobook narration as a completely different skill from most other types of performance. Unlike a radio play, advert or documentary voiceover, audiobook narration is above all a “literary endeavour”. For a professional voice actor, says McMillan, reading a book aloud is about understanding “how books work, how words work, how the arc of a sentence [works]; the weight of a paragraph, the shift into different tones and moods while at the same time not forcing your interpretation on it but trying to give the impression that the book is simply opening up in front of you.”
This skill can create moments of intimacy quite unlike any other form of entertainment. With most audiobooks being listened to through headphones, “you are literally inside their head”.
Would it be a stretch to suggest that audiobooks bridge a gap between the present and ancient oral storytelling? McMillan absolutely sees the connection. People, he says, “love the idea of making some kind of sense of the world, of having it described to them, and that innate, almost physical connection between the voice and the understanding [of the world] is really profound”.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Aoife McMahon. “Everybody loves to hear and tell stories. You know, I think particularly as Irish people, we’ve got a very rich oral tradition. And I guess the surge in audiobooks really speaks to that.”
Before books were widely available, and long before reading became an internalised, deeply personal experience, storytellers were revered members of society. We needed stories to connect us to the past and, as McMillan says, to make sense of the world.
But maybe we don’t need to go that far back. McMahon and McMillan agree that memories of childhood stories must play a role in the comfort people feel when listening to audiobooks. McMillan goes a step further. “It’s also before that, when you’re in the womb. Your first understanding of the outside world is sound,” he says.
The first audiobooks date from the 1930s, when the American Foundation for the Blind recorded a series of poems, extracts and short stories that included Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, and the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People recorded Joseph Conrad’s novella Typhoon as a set of four LPs.
For the next while audiobooks remained a philanthropic endeavour aimed largely at blinded veterans returning from war. Their popularity grew throughout the development of cassettes, CDs, streaming and downloads – and a strange thing happened. Often when we embrace new technology it severs another link to the “old ways”. But audiobooks have unexpectedly connected us to a past we never even knew we missed. Whether that past goes back as far as childhood or beyond is up to the listener.
