The Train in the Night

Starred review from July 29, 2013
Music journalist and first-time author Coleman’s memoir of his sudden hearing loss in one ear, and his attempts to deal with a future in which the sound of music—the thing he loves most—has been irrevocably changed, is a fantastic, sad, funny, and, finally, optimistic view of his quest “to get the music back—or at least to reconnect with it.” One day while having tea with his wife, Coleman hears a soft “pffff” in his ear, like the sound “of a kitten dropping on to a pillow”—a sound that evolves after a few days into a “wild humming” that resounds in his head “like the inside of an old fridge hooked up to a half-blown amplifier” and affects his ability to listen to his music. He spends three years adapting to his new condition during which time he seeks help from Oliver Sachs, among others. He also considers the ways his life has revolved around music and sound, and these meditations take up the bulk of his memoir. Coleman is remarkably adept at describing the moments of “hopeless disorientation” he experienced: “The reactive tinnitus took me close to the threshold of actual physical pain.” He also provides hilarious and astute observations views of many of his albums, such as the Rolling Stones’ Goat’s Head Soup, which Coleman perfectly describes as sounding “exactly how a record made on a Caribbean island by a bunch of knackered tax exiles with unlimited access to drugs ought to sound.” Agent: Jenny Hewson and Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge and White.

August 15, 2013
One of the most widely read music journalists in the U.K. loses his hearing and very nearly his mind. Not quite an autobiography, nor a focused memoir of illness, this tragic recollection by prolific rock journalist Coleman examines a lifetime's worth of choices in the wake of a devastating illness. In his mid-40s, the author experienced a form of tinnitus so severe that he imagined the inside of his skull was occupied by "a tiny monkey playing a tiny pipe organ." Stricken with sudden neurosensory hearing loss, a maddening syndrome with undiagnosable causes ranging from genetics to stroke, Coleman was understandably grief-stricken, given his profession. He punctuates his journey to his new existence with memories of his old one, the grim upbringing of a boy born in 1960, with many flashbacks focusing on the girl whom he loved from afar. The medical segments are harrowing, as Coleman describes in intimate detail procedures like having steroids injected directly into his inner ear. Early on, he broached the topic of assisted suicide with his wife, who told him, "Don't you DARE talk to me like that." The teenage autobiographical segments are readable but unremarkable, but Coleman's self-examination of his identity via music and his new interpretation of it are thoughtful and complex, recalling something of David Byrne's rich How Music Works (2012). "What was really interesting was that, as I sat there shuddering and trickling, I began to hear the music better," he writes. "Melody, metre, a little bit of timbre, the puffiest cloud of harmony. Yes, yes: that's a trombone all right, not just a note. And I began to sense the tiniest swelling of architectural form in my head. You wouldn't have called it the Taj Mahal, but equally, this was no papery squiggle." A disquieting but ultimately resilient reflection on the sound and the fury.

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