I have been trying to be more open to consuming books as audio recently. I’ve been doing a lot of sewing and knitting, and being able to listen to a story while my hands are busy is such a great convenience. It’s a format I sometimes struggle with, however. My default listening speed is 1.75x, because I simply cannot cope with the slowness of listening on 1x speed, and even then the time it takes to get through a book can often feel a little… treacly.
Which informs my choice of listening. I tend to gravitate in audio to poetry read by the author or shorter novellas, things where there just isn’t enough time for me to get antsy over the pace of things before we reach the end. And this does, mostly, work.
But I recently decided to try a novel – Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe by Emma Törzs – I’d been meaning to read since it came out, because I had a pretty substantial knitting project that I really wanted to motor through and I thought well… maybe?
And… I did listen to the whole thing. But it’s left me with a really interesting conundrum. Because there is a single point of issue I have with how the story unfolds, and it seems entirely plausible to me that this issue is all about that treacly slowness I feel when listening to audiobooks. But it’s also just as plausible it would have been there in the physical copy too. And I have no idea, short of re-reading the whole thing (and even that wouldn’t solve it because I already know all the reveals at this point), how I verify it.
So I’m going to proceed as if the issue exists in the text in whatever format one chooses to consume it, but take this with a pinch of salt.
The issue? The pacing. Specifically, the pacing of the reveals of things that feel, in text, like they are supposed to either surprise the reader, or be something they worked out but only a little before the characters. Unfortunately, there were several reveals that I had to go through whole chapters yelling inside my head “but the [redacted] is really a [redacted]!! It’s obvious!” to a character who could not hear me. And this is always a tricky one. In murder mysteries, I want, in a perfect scenario, to get to the answer – or at least have a hunch of it – only a short while before the reveal/the protagonist realises it. But how much is “a short while”? A couple of pages? A chapter? How do you plan for different readers being differently skilled at putting together your hints? If you make everything too obscure, you risk losing them to a reveal that came out of nowhere. If you make it too easy, it feels patronising. A tricky, tricky balance. Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe isn’t a murder mystery, but a lot of the same rules and issues apply – it is a plot built around secrets and their uncovering, the characters slowly building a cache of hints and information to get them closer and closer to the truth. Which gets frustrating if the reader feels like the truth has been obvious for half of the book, unacknowledged.
And is probably emphasised by the slowness of audio – I just have more minutes to sit with each piece of information, more time to digest before something new is thrown my way, which probably makes me all the more likely to piece things together.
And then you have to add in genre awareness. I, like many readers, have read other fantasy books before. And so the threshold for me assuming something is caused by <magic thing hinted at by story> is pretty low. But obviously, the characters in the story don’t have access to their meta (except in weird, fourth wall breaking stories, which are fun and can be amazing, but this wasn’t one), and so there’s the tension between what the reader can reasonably assume, and what the character can reasonably assume. But… well… the reader is reading it. It doesn’t necessarily matter that the character would be much less likely to jump to the conclusions you do – you’re the one reading it, and that frustration is very real, especially when it builds and builds over multiple small points and reveals, snippets of information giving away so much more to the reader than the characters.
Unfortunately, for me, this information mismanagement really cast a pall over my experience of the whole book. I look back and mostly remember that frustration, that sense of waiting for the story to catch up with me so we can move on to the fun stuff, that sense of constant pause and expectation without satisfactory resolution. The emotional catharsis of the reveals was never there, because they never were reveals, and so the whole thing fell a little flat.
Which isn’t to say there was nothing to love about the book. I found several of the characters rather charming (particularly Nicholas, posh, English, undersocialised nitwit that he is), and several of the secondary characters particularly had some really interesting backgrounds and motivations that slowly developed through the story. The dialogue was particularly well done, for the most part, and so when you get extended scenes of more character-focussed work, then the story really did shine.
And the magic system is fascinating. I enjoy how we come to learn about it – from characters who only experience it individually, taught on a small scale – and it comes through the book to feel both personal and truly mysterious, a system barely understood even by those with the weight of historical knowledge behind them to call upon. The true mystique that I want all magic to embody does show itself, from time to time, and I understood exactly why some of the characters were so enamoured with it, even despite its costs, because the narrative took the time to make plain their wonder.
There were also some really lovely snippets of descriptive language, especially when Törzs is describing the indescribable. Her magical moments are painted as almost nonsensical pictures, but ones that somehow sit intuitively deep in you, and make a sense they never should in the parts of you that crave that strange abstraction. She keeps returning to themes of bees and honey, and while evocative on their own, it kept resonating for me with how Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea likewise entwined its magic with a repeating metaphor of bees. Smell and taste too find a place of high honour, and there are moments in kitchens particularly that shine for their full sensory immersion, or sat on porches with a chill in the air, or snowy fields of cows. The physical, sensory and imagined worlds all find beautiful realisation throughout the story, and these moments, these lovely scenes, are a glorious respite from the frustrations.
Which, alas, exist outside of the pacing. As with many non-British authors, there are Britishisms that have clearly thrown Törzs off. Some of them are the basic linguistic ones – which alas were made more prominent when the audiobook narrator did the English accent for Nicholas’ dialogue than they might have been had I been reading a physical book – your “bookstore” type phrasings, that are totally comprehensible but entirely unnatural to the type of English speaker the character is. But some of them are subtler and more profound. The English characters in the story are all a very specific, very elite level of posh… and yet so much about them reads instead as more like middle to upper middle class, or even just outside that paradigm in ways that don’t make sense for the English context. The way they speak, the way they interact with the world, the way they use their money, the food they eat, so many little tells that build to a picture of not-quite-rightness for someone natively accustomed to that culture. But this is a hazard encountered so often, and one I am mostly used to ignoring*. It just came much more to the fore when hearing the slight wrongnesses in the right accent – all the more uncanny valley for the approximation.
And, for all that many of the characters are genuinely charming, it is somewhat slow going at the beginning to build that rapport with them. Esther in particular was someone I struggled to warm to for a number of chapters, and only truly came to love her when her narrative linked in more closely with everyone else’s.
So… a mixed bag. There are moments of genuine joy in there, and Törzs can really write a scene that lingers visually and sensorily in the memory. But so much of what is good in the book is undercut by the intense frustration of the pacing, and I suspect, looking back in however many months, it will be that frustration that lingers with me the most. I suspect, if she puts out another book, I will need to read it in physical, just to be certain I’m not manufacturing my own problems with it. I don’t think I am, but I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt. And if I am wrong, I hope to spend more time sitting in those lovely, artfully painted scenes, undimmed by the knowledge that all the characters complete numpties.
*egregious exceptions aside, like the intense mishmash of usage found in Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education
A Reader of Else 