The Edge of Silence, by Neil Ansell review: 'inspiring and uplifting'
In his bid to enjoy a bucket list of rare bird calls before finally losing his hearing, Neil Ansell taps into a universal urge to make the most of the time we have, writes Roger Cox
In his 2018 book The Last Wilderness, in which he detailed a series of solitary, multi-day, off-the-beaten-track walks in the Northwest Highlands, the author and naturalist Neil Ansell touched on his progressive hearing loss, and in particular his regret that he is able to hear less and less of the birdsong he loves. Now, in The Edge of Silence, he puts his ever-diminishing aural world at the centre of the story.
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Subtitled "In Search of the Disappearing Sounds of Nature", Ansell's latest book is his account of a summer spent travelling around the UK, seeking out the calls of birds and other creatures that he decides he would most like to hear before - potentially - his hearing gets so bad that any chance of experiencing them is gone forever.
It sounds like a melancholy pursuit, and in a way I suppose it is, but there's nothing self-pitying about the way Ansell tells his story. At heart he's an optimist, and there's something inspiring and unexpectedly uplifting about the quiet but resolute way he goes about ticking off the various items on his birdsong bucket list.
Of course, few readers will have any experience of or even much knowledge of the ins and outs of hearing loss, but it's the way Ansell links his own specific disability and challenge to the universal ticking of all our life clocks that makes his story resonate. As he puts it towards the end of the book: "I feel that I have done my duty by myself and filled all the gaps I regretted in my history of hearing. It is as if I have spent this year in defiance of a relentless, unstoppable countdown, which in a sense you could say that we all face, and that this is life, if you choose to see it that way."
It's not just bird calls Ansell is chasing - he spends an enchanting evening listening to a chorus of natterjack toads at Red Rocks nature reserve in Cheshire and returns to the Northwest Highlands to hear otters "chittering and squealing" outside his tent at night. However, it's the birds - and Ansell's vivid and precise descriptions of them - that are really the stars of the show.
He travels to the island of Coll to hear the "continuous, rasping croaks" of the Corncrakes; to Sanday where he is startled by a subterranean puffin, sounding "like a buzz or a tremor in the ground directly beneath me"; and to Shetland to hear storm petrels swarming bat-like around Mousa Broch, their cries "utterly alien to anything I have ever heard before".
He saves the best for last though - a great northern diver, or loon, as the Canadians call them, which issues an "unearthly, echoing wail."
"I may very well never hear that incredible call again," he writes, but that is fine. I have heard enough."
The Edge of Silence, by Neil Ansell, Birlinn, £15.99.
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