The Making of an Audiobook

Earlier this year I was thrilled to be asked back to narrate the second of critically acclaimed author Angela Saini’s novels “Superior, The Return of Race Science”.

Having voiced her first book “Inferior, How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story” which looked at how "deeply sexist notions have been woven into the fabric of scientific research" in early 2017, I was really excited to see where she was going next as a writer.  

When narrating the first book – at the time, the single largest project I had undertaken to date – it seemed poignant that given the themes of the novel, I was doing it all with a 3 month old baby in my life. Knowing that Saini is a mother herself, the subject matter spurred me on as I put in serious hours on a super tight deadline.

So in February 2019 when the publishers came back to me offering me a second book, and importantly, much more time to dedicate to it, I felt like I could really savour the experience.

Now, I know that some of the big names in audiobooks can crack out a 10 hour beast in a week, with a team of producers and editors behind them.  But this was me, myself, and I, for all of it.  All 85 thousand words of it.  I decided my strategy was going to be little and often.  Unlike ‘Inferior’ where I had just over 2 weeks to complete the entire project, by the time I received the manuscript for ‘Superior',  I had 6 whole weeks in which to stagger the work.  I put my daughter into a few extra hours childcare a week, and came up with a meticulous plan to narrate 7 pages a day, Mon-Fri, fitting it around my other voice work, and my family.

Speaking of strategy, I also decided in an act of infinite wisdom, that this was the ideal time to potty train my toddler. So as you read what follows, I ask you to hold in your mind the image of me switching between those roles.  My time in the booth - the subject matter I’ll describe, interspersed with dangling a tiny bottom up against unsuspecting hedgerows, over grass verges, and petrol station car parks. Think of me running wild eyed out of a charity shop with her under my arm like a football after hearing the quiet words “I’m doing a poo Mummy”. The rugby tackling of a small child on a well-known pub chain’s terrace who you know has just done a poo in their pants, but is also making a run for it. Imagine the whipping off a puddlesuit so late in the game that it’s literally all anyone within 3 feet can do to avoid the giggling jet-stream into the bushes because someone… was in… the toilet.  Is this what people mean when they talk about a work/ life balance?  I wondered to myself, as eight tiny pairs of pants and eight tiny pairs of trousers dried on the radiator after that night’s washing machine cycle.

As a non fiction title, Superior had no character voices to invent and keep consistent.  There were no accents to perform perfectly chapter after chapter. But in place of that was dense, research heavy, source-citing, name-pronouncing, long-word-using Science.  The official blurb states “Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science.”

This was heavy stuff.  Saini explores themes around colonialism, human rights abuses, genetic variation, migration, eugenics, the Holocaust. She explores how ‘race’ as we understand it is a social and political construct, and how, as a white person you could actually have more in common genetically with your Indian neighbour than someone of your own skin colour.

She looks at what British colonists did to aboriginal Australians, how children were removed from their parents, how their culture was systematically destroyed. She discusses how politics shapes science because it shapes the attitudes of the scientists who are practising it, and how to this day there are still racists working in the field, on the margins, gnawing away. 

Not long before starting work on Superior, I had taken my family to the Cotton Powell Museum in Kent close to where we live, and seen there the dioramas built by Percy Cotton-Powell.  Huge display cases full of stuffed animals and artefacts taken from Africa and the sub continent in the early 1900’s.  As I immersed myself in “Superior” I could really see in my minds eye some of the characters Saini paints along the way.

I’m not going to try and regurgitate the book itself – but what I can talk about is the discipline involved in taking on this kind of voice work.  As an article in the Radio Times that came out recently rightly states, audiobook narration is a marathon, not a sprint. What it boils down to, for me, is the ability to keep it fresh. The tenacity to self direct, and keep your own energy levels up – to come at the script with the right measure of excitement and wonder.  My job was to bring alive the words that Saini had diligently spent years putting down on paper.  In the Acknowledgements section at the end of the book she writes "This is the book I have wanted to write since I was a child and I have poured my soul into it". 

If I was looking for my motivation, there it was. To be asked to ‘be’ this woman's voice. I felt very strongly that I wanted to do the book justice - for her, and I hope that I have achieved that.

Superior will be released on audible on May 30^th 2019