On the Line

"I hear the board release, like a sigh. Still can't hear the footfall, but now I can hear the shape of a body in the hall just outside, the shadow in the room tone."

That is Nick Harkaway from his science fiction novel Titanium Noir (2023). I’ve wanted to read something by Harkaway for some time, and news that he’s writing a character based on his father’s most famous character (his dad was John le Carré, the character being George Smiley) led me to finally do so. It may be worth noting that a central figure in Titanium Noir is a literally towering giant of a post-human (it is science fiction) who draws family members close and into the broadly defined business. Perhaps there’s, I dunno, some subtext. In any case, this is one of several sonically expressive moments in the novel. Another key one is when a giant (called Titans) attacks the protagonist with the power of a laugh. 

. . .

"Talking this way is formal, in both senses of the word: formalizing conversation, rendering it visible and tangible, can sometimes make it feel strangely serious."

That is Max Norman writing in The New Yorker about the experience, when interviewing the artist Joseph Grigely, who is deaf, of doing so by writing things down, and thus taking greater pains than were they merely communicating with spoken words. “I found myself weighing my words,” he continues, “choosing not to ask a question that wasn’t perfectly phrased.”

. . .

"As I write this now at my flat in Edinburgh, I can hear the single toll of the tram bell as it heads along Leith Walk. (The ‘ding’ is singular but not resonant. It is a recording of a bell, and there is no tintinnabulation, as Edgar Allan Poe named it, no lingering sound, because the recording cuts it off. The tram bell is like a bad music hall singer, always in the middle of a note.)"

That is Andrew O’Hagan from his recent essay, “Stevenson in Edinburgh,” in the London Review of Books. (The Stevenson is, naturally, Robert Louis Stevenson.)