April 10th 2023

YOUR MOST AVID READER

(Or how a novel got heard)

What do you see when you write? What do you hear? I always hear before I see. Interactions, conversations, confrontations. Words between people; toying, teasing, misleading. So much of the real landscape of fiction, after all, is in what people say to each other.

In the summer of 2010, we took the kids to Lake Balaton, the shimmering playground of central Hungary, and stayed – as we had before – in a sleepy village called Szigliget, populated in the holiday season by foreigners like us. I woke on the first morning after a heavy, difficult night (crushed by heat and small children) and lay in the sun alone in the bedroom, thinking. I recalled a brief, rather peculiar friendship I’d had had some years before and which had ended very suddenly. In those days I often pondered this relationship, tried to get my head around its strange trajectory. Out of nowhere, I imagined writing a letter to this person and the conversation that would come from it. And then reality evaporated, and I was suddenly following a dream path which took me far from the truth and into a fictional setting.

When I got home, I started writing a book about an email conversation between two women. Within this conversation was couched a friendship and an evolving adventure full of jeopardy and mystery – all of it from their own mouths. When I finished it, a publisher friend recommended an agent who might be interested. The agent read the manuscript and called me in. He was surprisingly enthusiastic. “I’ve never stayed up half the night reading a manuscript before,” he said. I was astonished. Really? There’s always a but and both he and I knew that the but was insurmountable. He didn’t like the format. The story within the story. It didn’t work as a novel, was the suggestion.

I was convinced that it did work as a novel, not, I think, because I was sold on the format, but because I didn’t entertain the idea of any other means of storytelling at the time. If I didn’t tell it this way, then what other way could there possibly be? Never mind that I was, in effect, writing a long conversation, interspersed with documentary fragments; surely that was readable, wasn’t it? It was just my take on the epistolary novel, after all.

Narratives made up of exchanged letters, or a series of documents or diary entries have always found a home in the novel. Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Herzog, The Handmaid’s Tale, We Need to Talk About Kevin – in different ways, these books all recount stories via documental sources. We are not just readers but researchers, poring over facts as they are presented. In a dialogic format, where two voices ricochet off each other, we pick up what we can, aware that lives are being lived beyond what we are told. It requires an acquiescence from the reader, an acceptance that facts and feelings are trimmed according to the correspondent’s personality and intentions. What we often get in return is an intimacy and heightened sense of investment.

In other words, it’s a novel as audio drama. There is no all-seeing narrator to fill in the gaps. With that ubiquitous voice removed, lovers, friends, enemies “perform” their feelings while we listen in.

*

Your Most Avid Reader – my story of two women who collude in writing a version of British history – was never published. Instead, it’s become an audio drama. Or an audio story, to be more precise. It makes perfect sense now, even if it never occurred to me as I wrote it after that holiday by Lake Balaton. Audio recording brings a beautiful, unexpected new life to a lot of fiction. Of course it does! Writing is a telling process, an inner voice projecting to an inner ear. A story lives to be told and, as a producer at Tempest Productions, I’ve been astounded by the interesting new dimensions that a dramatic recording (one with judiciously used sound-editing) can give to a piece that hitherto existed on a printed page or on a screen. I’m thinking here of our Unbound series of short stories and the remarkable word- and soundscape that is The Absent Therapist (although, its author, Will Eaves, has also performed extracts from his book on stage and so already saw its audio potential.)

The process of adapting a book for audio has not been unlike preparing it for publication: constant editing and fine-tuning, but this time in an effort to make it work for a listener – and, of course, for an actor. Actors hear what a writer is trying to say but then the words get sieved through their own psychological experience and come out with a new and different authority. The writer, the actor, the producer, the sound editor, the listener: what seems like a fractured process is nothing of the sort. It’s a very natural and fluid means of making stories. The recorded voices in Your Most Avid Reader startle me with their rightness. When I listened to the earliest takes by Georgina Sutton and Rebecca Charles, I felt like I was hearing the story for the first time. Their complex mosaic of a conversation sits so comfortably beside Mark Lingwood’s pitch perfect narration. For the few moments when a female narrator is needed, Claire Davies adds another subtle element to the mix. Somehow, they’ve all kept the adventure small and intimate, while the stakes remain high.  

So, what is Your Most Avid Reader about? On the face of it, it’s a correspondence between two women: one a successful author of historical fiction, the other an amateur historian and a self-professed mega-fan of her work. It’s clear from the start that the author, Monica, is not quite as confident in her career as her readers might have thought, and that her fan, Hilary, has more to offer than adulation. She has appeared in time to give the struggling writer a plot idea, and together they set about constructing a novel based on an obscure moment of British history. Over 24 episodes, two stories unfold: the surprising and mysterious backstories of both women and the fictional tale of their very dramatic joint novel. As in all epistolary fiction, the women give away as much as they want in their correspondence and, just as they have to grasp each other’s motives, so do we.  

Your Most Avid Reader is a story about plotting, in all senses of the word: plotting stories and plotting outcomes, plotting the past as well as the future. It is, I hope, a good listen.

Your Most Avid Reader begins as a weekly series, going out on Fridays, from 14 April 2023. You can listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/user-986948053/sets/your-most-avid-reader

The illustration by the artist Carol Wyss is of the original cover for an aborted e-book. It’s powerful in its simplicity and the author is thrilled that it can finally have a proper, regular outing.

THE WATCH

October 2021

The Watch, which has just been published by Salt, was short-listed for both the Lucy Cavendish and Exeter fiction prizes. A dark psychological mystery, it takes you into the lives and minds of two brilliant young students who come across each other one stifling midsummer night. One of them is full of ambition, the other can’t bear to be alive, but their dramatic meeting makes a lifelong impact on both.

“Eerie, and disturbing, this is a powerful piece of writing which unsettles the reader.” Broo Doherty

“The sense of dread that continually rises and falls in the opening chapters is nothing short of masterful.”
Cathie Hartigan

“A well-judged, quietly alarming, fictional essay about egotism and truth-seeking, ambition and status, from an author who knows that our real motivations to do good, or to be of use, are often revealed by the actions of others.” Will Eaves

“Berki’s novel is an absorbing exploration of the responsibilities we have for other people, and what it means to do good, which tips expectations on their heads with a surprising conclusion.” The Herald Scotland

The Watch