I have just read Ruth Rendell’s The Monster in the Box, a Wexford novel whose elegiac nostalgia leads me to think that it may perhaps be the last.
It was published in 2009, but seems to have been written several years earlier – even a computer expert is still using cd’s & floppy disks, & there is reference to a proposed smoking ban in pubs.
Wexford is once again grappling with problems of racism & multiculturalism, though not as excruciatingly as in Simisola.
I found the book readable, especially the reminiscences about how things used to be during Wexford’s youth in the 50s & 60s.
In particular, it was extraordinary to be reminded that there was once a time when most people had never heard the sound of their own voice, other than by hearing themselves from the inside as they talked.
For years Wexford had thought that he spoke the Queens English, pure BBC, & then he had heard a recording made of his own voice & been disillusioned to find he had a Sussex accent.
Wexford probably never had elocution lessons – few boys did; but parents, mothers in particular, were quite likely to want their daughters to know how to speak like a lady. I was one of those; from the age of five my Saturday mornings were, in part, devoted to learning to enunciate properly.
But it was years before I heard, in my teens, a recording of my own voice; the increasing availability & affordability of reel-to-reel tape recorders & those booths where you could make a recording on thin plastic made it something of a commonplace for people to talk of the shock of hearing their own voice for the first time.
In these days of voicemail, if nothing else, I wonder if there is anybody who has not become familiar with the sound of their own voice, long before they reach their teens.
