Most of my time at present seems to be spent in a recording studio –not at all as glamerous as it might sound- recording two very different books. One is a history of the Comintern, full of worryingly difficult names and very long sentences, and the other is a gripping and rather mysterious novel by Ian McEwan called The Child of Time. Recording two so different books in tandem presents certain unique challenges, because the vocal quality required is very different in each case. For the history book the voice has to have a certain distance and certainly objectivity, whereas for the novel one has to –at times– live emotionally into the words –not so much playing the different characters, but suggesting them, sketching them like an artist on a canvas. The listener must be allowed to do the colouring in, for otherwise he or she has only a passive role in the storytelling, and I think that is fundamentally wrong. At other times one has more of a narrator function. So changing from one type of voice to another in the course of a recording session (which for me is usually about four hours) always takes a bit of time. But as I earlier this week have voiced amongst other things: a dragon, a bear, a moose, a lion, a little boy and a chameleon on another project, I think I can handle the transition from novel to non-fiction satisfactorily...
