Quality | 2009.04.16
Mark Lawson on audiobooks: It's way past bedtime
Novels are designed to be read, not heard. The audiobook boom risks infantilising literature
Anyone who listens to or works in radio gives regular thanks for the failures of British postwar transport policy: regular predictions that television would kill off listening were proved wrong by the large captive audience jammed on trunk roads and slowed on coned-off motorways.
But many of those inching to and from the coasts this weekend - while those banks that remain solvent are closed - may be deserting the wireless for a rival distraction, one in which the BBC is also a dominant player: figures released this week show that downloads have hugely enhanced the market for audiobooks, a format that first achieved popularity with the invention of the cassette and extended beyond childhood the experience of being read to. Like radio, the talking story has proved to be an art-form adaptable to new technology.
Although an occasional user, I have always been suspicious of texts being read, except in cases where the consumer has no alternative.
The major consumers of listenable literature divide between three groups: the blind and partially sighted; people whose eyes and hands are otherwise occupied - drivers, joggers, gardeners; and those who are too lazy to take in the information visually - mainly students who listen to their set-texts rather than reading them.
In the case of people for whom hearing a text read is the only alternative to braille, there can be no argument. The expansion in recorded literature has gone some way to reducing the cruel exclusion of visually impaired readers. Until audiobooks became big business, they had access to only a fraction of the most popular and important books.
There can also be little complaint about those who listen on roads or on pavements, except for the possible worry that a good story\'s ability to entrance may be dangerous.
So, the only real cause for concern are book-listeners who could take in the narrative the old-fashioned way but simply choose not to. For students to experience literature merely through the ears is unforgivable, and examination boards should aim to set questions on passages that tend to be omitted from spoken versions, which are generally abridged.
It\'s the fact that most recorded stories are substantially cut that makes the rise of the audiobook a potential defeat for writing. And even those sentences and paragraphs that are taped in full will often be diminished by the experience of listening. There is a visual quality to good writing - the shape and sequencing of the sentences, the length of words and paragraphs, the interruptions of punctuation - that pleads to be seen. That is why a novel, intended to be received through the eyes, and a playscript, written to be mediated for the ears, are such distinct forms.
I have some stories in the glove compartment for emergencies, but stick to dramatisations rather than a single actor doing what, it puritanically seems to me, I should be doing for myself. And yet clearly this rule invites exceptions, especially for poetry: Paul Scofield found far more meaning and atmosphere in Eliot\'s Four Quartets and The Waste Land than any reading inside my mind ever could. But poetry, like drama, is a more oral form than novels.
For most works of literature in most circumstances, a fully sighted reader who is not in a car or on foot should be reading rather than hearing. Despite their blessed conquest of obstacles to reading, talking stories ultimately risk an infantilisation of literature: a vision of a Britain full of grown-ups having stories read to them; books that, exacerbating the babying, will often be the Harry Potter novels. Adults should read grown-up stories to themselves. The best reading - always - takes place without a sound to be heard.
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