Best new audiobooks — fear and laughing

This is a column of two halves, and I wish that I had the freedom — as in Ali Smith’s ingenious How to Be Both — to allow you to choose which section to begin with, because one doubtless rests more heavily on the mind and heart than the other. But if we start in seriousness, we can perhaps come into the light with a little more appreciation of the importance of both.

This is not to imply that Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (Bolinda, 8 hrs 32 mins), which last week won the Booker Prize, is an onerous duty to be endured. It is an astounding and mesmerising book, and you will probably not feel the same after you’ve finished it; filled with pain and fear, it presents us with a microscopic portrait of humans under extreme duress. Its “what if” scenario — a roughly contemporary Dublin that has fallen under the control of a totalitarian regime, complete with secret police, political “disappearings” and the gradual erosion of all civil liberties — is not remotely far-fetched. The situations and events it portrays have happened in countless societies, and are happening now.

Lynch gives us a citizen’s-eye view through Eilish Stack, a microbiologist whose trade unionist husband is summarily detained, and who must find a way to keep her four children and her elderly father safe. The narrative busies itself with detailing the practical and mundane efforts that entails, but what is compelling is the way her inner life begins to fracture. As Eilish’s options dwindle, she can barely apprehend the reality of the world around her.

Actor Gerry O’Brien gives a magnificent performance, grasping the relentlessness of Eilish’s unmooring, and the inexorability of the choices she is forced to make. Lynch writes with a sort of lyricism, sentences splicing into one another and characters rising and falling as if in a dream, and it makes for a powerful listening experience: claustrophobic, frightening and, ultimately, inescapable. This is a novel I feel convinced will be read for many years to come, and this version is a chillingly immediate way to experience it.

Far more caperish is Naomi Alderman’s The Future (4th Estate, 13 hrs 3 mins), read by an ensemble cast including the author herself, who takes a turn as a member of an online survivalists’ forum. But it is not without its bleakness, as a group of tech billionaires plot their escape to a series of luxury bunkers in the event of an apocalypse. They might be all right, Jack, but for the rest of us it’s surely game over.

The Future is very definitely a novel-in-voices, and thus lends itself to audio adaptation, moving from one character’s memories of her cult leader father to another’s experiences of repression in Hong Kong, from retellings of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to truncated social media exchanges, or the eerie mechanised voice coming from one’s personal survival suit. While its execution might be engagingly upbeat, its concerns are anything but: these corporations have us in their sights, it seems to say, and they’re not done yet.

But I promised some unequivocally lighter fare — and it’s seasonal to boot. I was so cheered up by Janice Hallett’s The Christmas Appeal (Viper, 3 hrs 35 mins) that I’ve already listened to it twice; obviously, it’s short, but it’s also funny and twisty enough to bear repeating. Hallett revisits the world of the amateur dramatists that we met in The Appeal, and has them, naturally enough, putting on a panto — its faltering progress to the stage documented via emails and texts between them and, in audio manifestation, delivered by a cast of readers. Characters include the young lawyers set to determine the truth of the body in the beanstalk by a wily KC and, as before, it’s the sense of them poring over a knotty mystery while information is drip-fed to them — and us — that is particularly satisfying.

Similarly, the latest in Sophie Hannah’s Agatha Christie continuations works on the basis of our sympathetic identification with Inspector Edward Catchpool, forever doing his best to keep up with his clever Belgian comrade. Hercule Poirot’s Silent Night (HarperCollins, 8 hrs 58 mins) is read, as with the other books in the series, by actor Julian Rhind-Tutt, who manages to convey Catchpool’s long-suffering devotion to Poirot perfectly. But Catchpool is now faced with an even greater challenge; his mother’s attempts to lure him and Poirot to a doomy clifftop mansion for Christmas.

Only if they solve an apparently motiveless murder in triple-quick time can they escape their festive fate — which becomes even more problematic when Poirot himself is attacked. You would not bet against them, of course, and this diverting and cleverly engineered mystery, abounding with amateur sleuths, district nurses, bluff policemen and warring siblings, is just the ticket to accompany you through cold snaps and Christmas preparations alike.

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