This book is one that will probably discourage and alienate as many readers as might find themselves absorbed by it. I will address the frustrations first.

The book recounts and accumulates evidence of one experiential fact: sound can, under certain circumstances, produce emotionally ambiguous or ‘uncanny’ effects in us – the creaking door in the night, the ticking clock, the dripping of water in a resonant space, the distant rumbling of thunder, the murmur of wind in the trees, the scurrying of mice under the floorboards, and so forth. The auditory is available – and in ways that differ from the ocular – for contributing to the arousal of eerie moods in subjects who are predisposed to such states (by anxiety or by drowsy semi-consciousness, for example).

Most of us are in possession of a nervous system that is disposed to react to stimuli in ways that are instinctual and that are, from an evolutionary standpoint, extremely useful. It is uncontroversial to observe that sounds can register in us as sensations – and we might respond to them – before we take it upon ourselves to deliberate about their meaning and figure out our best response. Indeed, according to some theories of consciousness, we live most of our lives non-thetically; we are conscious, active, but not necessary reflecting cognitively on what we are doing or upon our environment. It seems reasonable to allow that sonic sensations can get ‘under the wire’, as it were, of our rational and realistic engagements with our world, and a sound that is distant, invasive, secret, interior, or unlocatable in space or dislocated from its source might well exercise the imagination and nerves in ways that disturb, frighten or even simply amuse.

By amassing instances of such experiences – these are either personal experiences of the author's, or representations of the sonically intriguing from, largely, film, literature or painting – Sinister Resonance can be added to a growing number of books which celebrate and promote interest in the neglected sense of hearing. High on its agenda is the countering of the ocularcentrism of Western thought and culture. This is a laudable ambition in my view, but a difficulty arises because Toop is attempting to recuperate the sonic by re-enchanting the sonic. He places his text in a double bind: he has to defend the importance of the sonic while, with the same gesture, making it disappear into a lugubrious spectral ether. Toop does employ a remarkable range of reference points to advance this idea, and the high-risk strategy of drawing on the private life of the author does, on occasion, prove captivating, but the main disappointment of the book is that this particular strategy of re-enchantment is self-defeating, if not regressive. How and why this project is sustained is extremely interesting and instructive, however. I will confine attention to three areas of weakness in the book.

Firstly, the abstraction of sonic experience from other sensory and emotional investments and from the total context of environmental ‘being’ (or Being-in-the-world) throws the writing into a malign circularity with its own ambition. To explain, the sounds I can hear as I write this review are: a ticking clock, a wasp trying to get out of a closed window, scaffolding being assembled and traffic from the road outside. If I choose to, I can attend ever more closely to these sounds and seek out their detail, structure or potentiality qua sound. Then I might consider writing about the sound from this peculiar and intensified perceptual stance. One can form sentences that try to convey the strangeness of this new relationship to these phenomena. Of the ticking clock I write: ‘as I listen closely, the regularity of the clock betrays an unevenness, its insistence rises and falls, as though it is breathing’. Or the sound of the traffic is ‘grey and dusty like heat on a road’, or the wasp sounds ‘machine-like and abrupt, a drill’. In every case, the sound itself is not enchanting: my decision to abstract the sound from its source and attended to it with greater than normal intensity is what is at issue. Once a sound is disconnected from its source, I am free (or as free as my literary technique and imagination will allow) to form combinations and analogies with other sensations and other things. Importantly, I can cross modalities and natural orders, give sounds colours, make machines breathe, make insects electric. This is a specific act of poetic production which does not originate in, or prove, the strangeness of sound.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the book is full of references to the brave and intensely poetic articulations of modernist authors: Kafka, Woolf, Joyce and Beckett all make frequent appearances and there is no doubting Toop's acute ear (and eye) as a reader. In the foregoing examples I merely aped the technique of Virginia Woolf. Toop picks out a line from Mrs Dalloway, a line that has fascinated me also: ‘For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, that said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.’ The sound of the Westminster chimes is given back the dense, material fact of their origin, but via an inventive oxymoron. I re-quote these lines from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet which illustrate, beautifully, the poetic logic I have just described: ‘Behind me, on the other side of where I'm lying down, the silence of the house touches infinity,’ and ‘I hear time fall, drop by drop, and not one drop that falls can be heard’ (p. 158). Are these lines enchanting? I would say so. Do they feel true? I would say so. But as instances of ‘sinister resonance’ they only show that sound (or silence) is available to the imagination for a certain kind of darkly ambiguous poetic composition from a consciousness that is already completely committed to attending to reality in extraordinary ways.

Second problem: given the importance the book places on notions of haunting, the sinister, the strange, or the uncanny, I am surprised that so little opportunity is given over to interrogating the meaning of these terms, or indeed, explaining their cultural or historical emergence or importance. Admittedly, pursuing ‘explanation’ is an academic pretension that the book never comes close to adopting. The condition and logic of ‘haunting’ (something like a liminal state, neither alive nor dead, neither present nor absent) is judged a priori to be inexplicable and mysterious and also to be the natural – or supernatural? – domicile for sounds. This assumption is never explored, let alone tested; it merely houses a retinue of variations on that same theme. Toop's prose attempts – and occasionally succeeds rather beautifully – to occupy this register of lucid bafflement, not to explain it. But a certain kind of stream-of-consciousness can often be the result:

It is not unthinkable that a reader might collaborate with these crafty formulations – one might call them riffs – but this would be at the cost of occupying a mildly dissociated state of mind. But techniques of ‘seduction’ are wasted on anyone not already willing to be seduced and these coy prevarications before the sense of the matter only delay realistic engagement with the nature of sound and listening.

It can be stressed, however, that an aspiration for ‘realism’ does not preclude the poetic. The difference between Pessoa's writing and Toop's is precisely that Pessoa's can withstand interpretation. And yet Pessoa's thinking relates intimately to himself. Toop's ruminations can read like the unpoetic and unproductive forms of fantasy that are employed to evade the real. Regrettably, Toop fixes on this same register in other writers. He refers to ‘an experiment in which Walter Benjamin took 0.4 of a gram of hashish’. Benjamin's experiences included the following response to the sound of a barking dog: ‘Test subject speaks of a jagged dog and explains barking as an acoustic serration. The jagged dog is contrasted with the polished dog – that is the quiet dog’ (p. 63). Benjamin's surreal observation is pithy and amusing, but it was made by one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. But does not the fact that he had taken hashish deserve some kind of comment: what is illustrated here? Is this really an insight about sound? Or do we merely learn that clever people who take drugs say odd things?

In the absence of any ‘theory’ of sound, listening or even a theory of ambiguity or the spectral, there is a lack of critical edge. There is also no means of delineating the proper subject of inquiry. So my third difficulty with the book is that it is allowed to sprawl as a bricolage, whereby anything picked up to do with sound, listening or the ghostly is given page space. The result is a discontinuous assemblage of fragments, loosely arranged into thematic groups. There is also a remorseless application of a simple rhetoric: First, open with a bold opening gambit, get their attention. ‘As I write this, my mother is dying, slowly, painfully’ (p. 30). Rule two: keep pressing sound into a semiotic ambiguity, find a presumptive and evasive syntax and presume the adequacy of these constructions. Why, though, should his uncontroversial thesis be subject to such belabouring, such perpetual re-assertion? Is it doomed so to do because there is no space given to the general case, the general conditions of the sinister that would allow particular experience any interpretative depth? There is no other formal option but a litany of instances.

Despite these problems, I remain impressed with Toop's personal courage and honesty. The impulses here are refreshingly counter-academic. Although the book flirts with academic procedure, and is sometimes beguiled by the credentials of ‘authorities’, it does not become entrenched in dreary arguments or privilege any particular viewpoint. This book falls into that burgeoning category of work that is attempting to compose a picture of the world autoethnographically, to write from the first-person perspective, with a fullness and a faithfulness to lived experience. Attempting to honour the visceral urgency and strangeness of actual life deserves respect. The danger here is always solipsism. Without positing or laying claim to general conditions of existence, then, like the photograph album, the playlist or the recounting of a foreign holiday, such memories and experiences that we may wish to recount or invoke will mean little or nothing to anyone other than ourselves.