Inner voice

The Grauniad asks ...

Describe how you express your inner thoughts - is it an internal monologue or something more abstract like sound or shapes?

My most coherent inner thoughts are expressed, as the question poses, as an internal monologue. While this manifests as if it's sound, i.e. it is not dissimilar to hearing an external voice, there is never any confusion between it and sound. In that sense, it seems a little like sound in dreams, where events are not presented in silence, but somehow there's an indefinite qualitative difference with actual sound. Possibly, at some fundamental level so that, even when deep in a dream, the mind is able to separate internal fiction from a real external danger or alarm. One feeling that I do frequently have when thinking with my inner voice is that there's some nonverbal part of my mind running ahead of the voice. This feels like a symbolic chain of thought, and it's almost as if the narrative part of me is following in its wake, struggling a little to keep up. Sometimes it even feels like my inner voice skips over something that's already been thought by this deeper (and faster) layer, just to keep up with it. None of which particularly surprises me. As a biologist, I'd expect something like this sort of nonverbal chain of thought to be an inheritance from our animal ancestors. I imagine that many of them have a consciousness like our own in many respects (emotions, choices, the eerie sense of being here), but without a verbal layer sitting on top. Although I do wonder if some particularly advanced animals, whales and primates, may have the rudiments of the same. Returning to the question, my perception of conscious words on top of semi-conscious symbols may be a function of my working life. Much of my activity involves words, either as emails, reports, papers or presentations. Perhaps, if you don't need to use words so much moment to moment, you have a better connection with what I've described as symbolic. It's obviously not possible to exist as a modern human without language, but it maybe doesn't have to be as all-encompassing as it is for a now-instinctive writer like me. That said, when I'm doing manual tasks (particularly so when quickly), I don't have an inner voice narrating things. But I know that some people do have a more continuous inner voice, commenting on their conscious experience regardless, or at least so they perceive. In any case, it might be that the majority of responders to this question are precisely those with a more verbal mode of thinking.

More than nostalgia

The Rotters Club, Jonathan Coe

The first predecessor to Coe's recent Middle England (although more like a prequel to me given I'm reading them in the wrong order), The Rotters Club is a simply brilliant evocation of the political and cultural zeitgeist of England in the 1970s. Filtered largely through the lives of teenagers at high school (all middle-aged, appropriately enough, in Middle England), it's also - by turns - searing and hilarious on this formative life stage. While there are occasional nostalgic interludes, the novel has bigger fish to fry, with the trades unions and Tories, race relations and the IRA all in its sights. But much of its entertainment value comes from recognition of the teenaged incomprehension, self-importance and angst of its primary characters. While more heightened than my own "skooldaze", I definitely recognised the agonised feelings and the japes, and even some of the characters (our Harding was called Haig). And I also had a shuddering familiarity with the general complicity towards racism painfully traced out. On these facets, it's particularly excellent, but it's much more of a solid all-rounder. The steady buildup of its labour relations backdrop, that completes with the ascension of Margaret Thatcher, is another highlight. As does the infusion of the dark IRA thread, and the timely spectre of the Yorkshire Ripper. Overall, it's a novel that's impossible not to recommend.

Finally, one distinction from Middle England is that this book was written from a position of hindsight, while Coe's Brexit novel is practically reportage. This lets the political scaffolding of The Rotters Club sit half-finished, because we know what calamities happen next. It'll be interesting to see how the future treats the later novel. Except for the fact that we'll have to live through it first.