Sara Maitland

This is a weird and wonderful book. Bernie Krause, who started out as a popular musician and then in the mid-Sixties began to experiment with synthesisers and electronic mixing, has spent the past 40 years recording natural noises — individual species, but more importantly, perhaps, whole habitats and therefore the relationship of the different sounds within specific environments. He has recorded over 15,000 different topographies, and is recognised as a global expert. However — and this is his point — at least half of these ‘soundscapes’ no longer exist; their ancient music has been corroded, thinned out or even silenced by human background din, as well as by the exploitation and destruction of so many of the habitats and species themselves.

For five months of the year Philip Connors (once an editor at the Wall Street Journal) has a fascinating job: he is a firewatcher in the vast Gila National Forest in New Mexico, USA. He lives in a hut five miles off any road and, from a high tower, watches for tell-tale plumes of smoke that mark the start of another forest fire. The job only lasts from April to August because such forests only catch fire in the summer; some of the fires in the Gila are caused by human stupidity, but most are started by lightning. In between watching and reporting fires, Connors gets to roam through, fish and look at one of the great stretches of remaining wilderness in the USA — and read, maintain his cabin and write.

A.L. Kennedy is a very remarkable writer. And her new novel — the first since Day won the Costa prize in 2007 — is a remarkable book. What is really extraordinary about it is that at one level it is a pretty trite love story with dark secrets to be revealed and lots of reflection on truth and lies and how the past lingers on and affects the present — bog-standard stuff. The basic set-up is somewhat improbable, and (as always with Kennedy) somewhat elliptical, even evasive. Elizabeth, the protagonist, is crossing the Atlantic on a cruise ship with her boyfriend who may or may not be planning to marry her.

A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland The BBC sound archive has a range of different silences: ‘night silence in an urban street’; ‘morning silence, dawn, the South Downs’; ‘morning silence, winter moor’; ‘silence, sitting room’; ‘silence, garage’; ‘silence, cement bunker;’ ‘silence, beach’. You only have to read those phrases to know, viscerally, that their differences are true and real, and that you could add any number of others. Silence, kitchen, with fridge; silence, theatre; silence, restaurant, across the table; silence, restaurant, rural, general; silence, car, after argument; silence, bath; silence, bed, 3am; silence, at the Cenotaph; silence, friendly and silence, not.

In the original Decameron by Boccaccio (mid-14th century) ten characters get together and tell stories within a narrative framework. It is an immensely attractive idea for a writer and has been used periodically ever since, notably by Chaucer. This is the basis for Fay Weldon’s latest novel. However, it has an odd and unattractive contemporary twist: all the characters tell stories about themselves. This is a book of fictional gossip, all first- person and poor-little-me. Or rather not ‘poor’ at all.

What on earth is a ‘high concept novel’? For the expression to have any meaning you’d have to have a low concept novel, a medium concept novel and even a no concept novel. How high? Compared to? It doesn’t make sense. Nonetheless this is one. (In fairness to Fay Weldon she does not say so; the blurb writer does.) From the evidence I can only deduce that ‘high concept’ means ‘bit of a mish-mash’. Mantrapped is half of a novel and half of an autobiography plus author’s commentary on writing the (half) novel. The idea is that in our celebrity culture there can no longer be a ‘hidden’ author.