Journey Through Landscapes with Captivating Audiobooks

Audiobooks: a companion through the landscape.

My love of audiobooks stretches a long way back, into a world that my teenage son does not really comprehend. I once showed him a cassette tape and he looked on in wonder and with not a small amount of pity at the rigours we once had to endure. And in the case of audiobooks, they were something of a trial. One of my favourites was nearly 20 cassettes in a big plastic folder, or box, I wonder now how anyone could have advertised it as being portable.

An avid reader (of almost anything) from a very young age, coupled with being a child of the countryside, meant that as technology moved on, I rekindled my love of audiobooks as an adult.

I live and work in a rural community, and it is fair to say that I spend a large proportion of my time alone, and that is just how I like it. Truthfully, I am never alone; I have my mobile and hundreds of audiobooks to take along with me, thanks to a very popular app.

There is something about audiobooks that increases your enjoyment of the great outdoor spaces. They can assist in making lighter any onerous task one is expected to perform.

Take for example England or Woodston, by John Lewis-Stempel. The language used to describe the countryside he knows and loves so well can increase the feeling that I have for the area in which I am working, the task which I am undertaking. Woodston is a particular favourite of mine, being a place that I drove past daily, for many years, seeing the old hop kilns and wondering at their history, now that they are converted to homes. 

I first listened to Woodston whilst working for a customer, whose garden looks out over that way. Listening to the history while I went about the business of removing some fallen trees and putting them through the chipper had me conjuring images of old farmer Pudge taking the Land Rover up the driveway to the house.

Even distant tales from the places we know and love can bring us nearer to what we love about where we are now. I listen to the way that Reginald Hill describes his home county of Cumbria, the Lakes and the Fells, in his novel The Woodcutter and I cannot help but yearn for that county, which lies close to my heart also. But it reminds me of the wild places on my doorstep, not so tall as Cumbria and perhaps not so barren, but in many senses quite as wild. I am working out ways in my mind to both escape back to the Fells as soon as I can, but also where I can get my fix for the extremes more locally. I yearn for a hard winter.

There is also the joy of hearing place names and landmarks that are well known and local; one day I will discover where P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle really is – I don’t think anyone has got it quite right yet. 

Even when I am outdoors when I don’t wish to be, doing something that I don’t wish to do, such as finding where the roof from the field shelter has gone in the latest storm, or digging out a snowdrift, there will be an audiobook for that. Perhaps the best would be something by Peter Mayle, A Good Year, works well. There is comedy, mystery, sunshine and rather a lot of drinking. I love Provence and while I doubt I would wish to live there, that book playing in your ears is enough to whisk you out of whatever you have just sunk your foot into below the line of protection afforded by a Wellington boot.

For fun and adventure in a setting that is known to so many of us, perhaps I could suggest anything written by John Buchan, but especially John McNab, or The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Surely in the case of John McNab there cannot be a more read book, by lovers of fieldsports, as well as those who have adventure in their hearts.

Listening to the adventures of Richard Hannay brings you even closer to the freezing cold experience of his night exposed in the Highlands.

I think it is the way in which the author binds the narrative of the story to the landscape, bringing it into focus, even if we have never seen it, not just by simple description, but in a way we can see how beautiful, difficult, unforgiving, yielding, bountiful, or even vengeful, that country can be.

The people who live and die there, who love it and tend it, who are beaten by it; those who meet its challenge and keep getting back to their feet. Not to master it, at least not in the end, but in an attempt to reconcile with it, to live both in and with it. R.F. Delderfield explores these very well in his A Horseman Riding By trilogy.

My first visit to Dartmoor was for no other reason than to see if I could find the inspiration for Grimpen Mire. I know now that it is likely to have been the mire near Fox Tor, but in those days Google was just an odd word and all I had were an OS map and an in-depth knowledge of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I spent a week there praying to all of the gods that I would be forced to hole up in an old stone shelter on the moor, watching the mists and fog roll across the moor, cutting me off from humanity, waiting to hear the call of the hound – in typical British fashion the weather was lovely all week with nothing more than light evening mists to deal with. With every visit I make that entails me crossing Dartmoor, that is the audiobook of choice, it’s a great story, but listening to it brings you that much closer to the horror and loneliness of it all.

Of course the story, or narrative, is only part of the joy that you get from the audiobook, the narration is equally important. I’ll include radio plays here (I still listen to The Archers – Omnibus every Sunday while preparing dinner), as they are perhaps the best example of why the narration is important – because it is not narration; it is acting. And to give the good performers their due, they are voice actors, nothing less. Good acting brings the whole book closer to you, rouses you, forces you to listen. 

A good voice actor can bring you into the story, make you think about the parallels with your own life and experience; a bad one makes you switch off and go back to what you were doing before.

The good voice actor can elevate the text, the words carry the emotion with which they were written, this is best shown with books that began as diaries, or journals. The personal thoughts that are expanded by the author, to craft a tale that we will enjoy. I’m hoping to hear Native by Patrick Laurie as an audiobook soon; it was an outstanding read and, I think, would make a brilliant audiobook.

I’m an avid reader and I will always enjoy sitting down with a book in hand. Audiobooks not only bring me the joy of experiencing more books than my working life would allow for, but also the joy of hearing the story, experiencing the landscapes, while looking at what is about me, the similarities and the differences. The ways in which we are so similar and so far apart.