Book Review: ‘The Edge of Silence’ by Neil Ansell

I can’t remember how we made initial contact, but the author Neil Ansell and I have been online friends for several years. In late 2019, I finally got to meet him, and we took a short walk along a section of the Rochdale Canal. During our walk, Neil explained how his hearing has always been poor and continues to decline, meaning he struggles now to hear certain bird songs. I’ve thought about that conversation many times since, usually when listening to high-pitched, bordering-on-undetectable bird calls from the likes of goldcrests. I also think about it whenever I use the Merlin bird-song-detecting app, which often hears distant calls I didn’t pick up until the app drew my attention to them. As my ongoing but ultimately doomed battle against the entropy continues, I wonder how much longer I shall be able to enjoy such sounds.

In The Edge of Silence, Ansell sets out to hear a number of (mainly new to him) iconic British nature sounds while he still can. His wish list, which is mostly birds, includes ptarmigan, bitterns, red-throated divers, corncrakes, black grouse, snipe, puffins, storm petrels, and manx shearwaters.

At one point, Ansell reflects sentiments about the perversely comforting inevitability of entropy’s eventual triumph that I found uncannily similar to my own:

I find it curiously calming and reassuring to reflect that nothing really lasts, that all we really have is the ability to appreciate as fully as we are able whatever we have in this moment, in the here and now. Perhaps the most useful thing we can do is to try to ensure that others get the opportunity to experience the same wonders as we do.

We might not all ultimately end up enjoying the haunting cry of the great northern diver, or a night-chorus of the natterjack toads on my native Wirral, but Ansell’s lovely book does at least help us experience such wonders by proxy.

Highly recommended.

Disclosure: As this review makes clear, Neil Ansell is a personal friend. He also provided some cover blurb for my book On the Moor.