Book review: Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories by Ed Garland

Desmond Clifford

The essence of this book is that we don’t value fictional sound in literature in the same way as we appreciate the visual image. This is surely true and a proposition I, for one, hadn’t previously given much thought. The author, Ed Garland, is preoccupied with sound largely because of a decline in his hearing, for reasons he reveals in this collection of essays.

Our relative inattention to sound, as readers, is odd given that most of us are introduced to literature through being read stories as children. We then move on to silent reading as though this is grown-up. As the author notes, this is “a relatively new and weird innovation in the history of literature”. For centuries, literature was most often practiced out loud, necessarily so since most people couldn’t read. This was changed by the Reformation, the printing press and mass literacy.

Only during the last couple of hundred years has reading silently become a norm in literate societies. I wonder if we’re now moving back towards reading out loud? I know a good number of people who have essentially stopped reading books but receive their literature in audio form through the i-pod. In reading, as in some other areas of life, I’m becoming a dinosaur and just can’t get on with audio books.

Auditory approach

Ed Garland applies his auditory approach to reading across a range of writers, Welsh and non-Welsh. He lives in Aberystwyth and the town, and its soundscapes, inform his reading. Niall Griffiths is an important influence, especially his novel “Grits” which is set there. Garland apprehends the novel through the sounds and sights of Aberystwyth and relates to the sonic qualities attributed by Griffiths to the surrounding landscape, “They can be heard, sometimes, the mountains…”.

Garland considers Lewis Jones’ “Cwmardy”, a depiction of industrial workers’ lives in south Wales across the early decades of the twentieth century. Garland appreciates its sonic qualities. The pit “was never silent or still”, the hooters blasted the start of the working day at five a.m., a chapel funeral covered “the valley with a blanket of shivering sound”. Unlike the sounds of nature, “Cwmardy” conveys a world created by man and “the acoustic territory of Lewis Jones’ fiction is no longer available in real life.” He considers the sounds of west Wales in Cynan Jones’ “The Dig”. The act and sound, “the slice of the spades digging the ground”, has a sinister role at the centre of this menacing rural story.

Garland completes his “sonic map” of Wales by considering Brenda Chamberlain’s “Tide-race”. Chamberlain lived on Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli) for many years. Her experience, at least so far as her literary record is concerned, is anything but romantic. She inverts the sense of the island as a refuge and the sea as a comforting gentle presence. On the contrary, she describes “the thunder of the conflicting tides” and manic choruses of screaming, cackling shearwaters and guillemots. I can feel the fear and cling to the comfort of my house murmuring strangely, but with familiarity, in the night-time. Garland contends that reading with a sonic sensibility “can improve our hearing” and help us unravel multiple layers of meaning in sound. I think he’s right.

“Earwitness” is partly a way of reading of books and partly a confessional memoir. The author describes his relationship with sound and his own progressive partial loss of hearing, seemingly – in part at least – through listening to music too loudly for too many years and ignoring warning signals. His diminished hearing links to a wider mental health decline and sense of hopelessness, at some stages in his life, partly ameliorated by reading and developing a different relationship with hearing.

‘Aural diversity’

Garland acknowledges, generously, the Welsh Government’s reference to “aural diversity” in its “national noise and soundscape plan” (who knew?!). As he says elsewhere, “everybody hears differently”. He emphasises the benefit for writers of checking manuscripts out load. Whether a text is ultimately designed for silent or public reading, the sound of words hanging together is at the heart of all literature. The author studied sound engineering – a study which destroyed his desire to pursue sound as a career – and these essays mingle literary appreciation with exploration of sound science, which I found interesting.

The author acknowledges Welsh writing as a deep source of sound in literature, although whether it’s more so than any other type of literature must be uncertain. He is keen on Joyce’s “Ulysses”, one of the most sonic books ever written and, I contend, which only makes full sense when read out loud. He’s also keen on Beckett, another author whose work is auditory, literally so in his dramatic works. Garland attaches a short, but eclectic and stimulating, bibliography of works referred to in the text.

Oddly, the author barely mentions poetry, even though poems often create an enhanced auditory environment among readers. We’re much more likely to read them out loud, literally or in our heads. Poetry makes different demands of a reader and we tend to be more composed and concentrated to meet its form.

This is a good, short and thoughtful book. It is well-written and original and engages this reader in an under-considered topic. There is no lack of sound in literary text. Dickens, for example, teems with noise. In John Le Carre, silence – itself a type of sound, of course – builds and stretches the tension. What’s missing, too often, is our deficiency as readers. We see the picture all too readily, but we watch a silent movie.

Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories by Ed Garland is published by Parthian and is available in bookshops now.