‘Every ass,’ runs an old English expression, ‘likes to hear himself bray.’ Not always. Not this old ass.
A few weeks ago, the company that bought the audiobook rights for Shearwater invited me to do the narration; part of me was quite excited, the part that quite likes the idea that the book is read as it was written. The majority of me was appalled, mainly the bits that knew from experience how an audiobook can be made or broken by the voice reading it. Personally, I like a book with a bit of RADA training behind it. Neither was the irony lost on me that most people think I talk quite enough, anyway.
After two of the three scheduled days, the issues have boiled down to three things: mannerisms, accents and extraneous noises.
Anyone who watched a previous episode of me showing off (Mastermind; 2007; first round loser) will know that I have two unfortunate mannerisms when presented to the public: an unconscious but noisy sniff that disengages half my face as it is happening, a signal of confidence, and an even noisier swallow, like a giraffe swallowing a ball-cock, when things are going wrong. I have discovered a third in the last two days, namely selective word-blindness. The producer and I are working our way through these as we go, with each 5000 word chapter taking about 8000 words to get right.
Foolishly, for a man whose foreign accents invariably sound like anything but the tongue they are supposed to imitate, the book is well stocked with snippets of Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Dutch and Spanish conversation.
‘Try your best,’ said the producer. ‘Just no ethnic minorities, please. That’s a no-no.’
Well, given that my Welsh accent sounds like it comes from Lahore, this is a bit limiting. But as my Pakistani accent has an eerie closeness to lowland Scottish, I think that I have found a solution by one remove. My Irish sounds like Welsh, and my Spanish either sounds like Manuel in Fawlty Towers (‘eees no rat; eees hamster’), or like an unsuccessful Italian ice cream salesman on a Venetian sidewalk. Only the Dutch is passable, partly because I spent five anxious months of my life washing dishes for a Scheveningen chef in Switzerland, and partly because all you need to do is replace the ‘s’ sound with an ‘sh’. Kind of like Sean Connery, but without the tax avoidance. The jury is so far out on how I have done up to now in this respect, that most of them haven’t even left their own beds, let alone got to the courtroom.
The worst thing, though, is ‘extraneous noise’, as the producer likes to call it. This can be as small as a politely suppressed belch, or as large as the construction drilling project in the next door house that finally defeated even our soundproof booth this afternoon. The main culprit so far has not been my leg jiggling (‘I think there may be some furniture vibrating in there with you’), but the extraordinary chemical goings on in the one litre container that I like to think of as my stomach. Twelve times in Chapter 7 alone it made its unwelcome presence felt, and twelve times I had to re-record the paragraph. We’re thinking of calling the book ‘The Gaviscon Monologues’.
And yet, and yet. ‘All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world’ according to Ulysses, or Tennyson, or someone else, and I have to be honest and say that I am privileged by every minute of it.
Five years ago, I was staring at an empty screen, trying almost desperately to filter out some early words that then might just possibly drip from the hillside of my imagination into rills, and then becks and then streams and finally rivers as they gathered some momentum of their own and made their way to the sea of what might become a book. Writing is like that.
So, just to sit here and write a little piece about my crap foreign accents is actually an important little staging post in a journey that I have been wanting to take all my life.
And which makes me very happy.
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