The Big Read: Imagine with your ears

"They prowl the empty streets at night, waiting. In fast cars and on foot."

When I was very young I would lie in bed with my father listening to the radio. The room was always very dark except for the radio dial and a thin bar of light from the passage. I lay with my head on his chest while he breathed and I tried not to think about how easy it is not to breathe and we listened to Squad Cars or Test the Team or The Mind of Tracy Dark. He smelt of soap and Old Fox Rum 'n Maple pipe tobacco. Afterwards if I was still awake he told me stories about his life. Some of the stories were real and some must surely have been exaggerated but they all gave me that beautiful doubled feeling of being somewhere else but also precisely, perfectly where I was.

Life became more complicated when television started. On Fridays I had to choose between Squad Cars and Bonanza. Sometimes I'd try do both: I'd wait for a slow patch then run through to the lounge and then back again. This was unsatisfactory; I was always half somewhere else.

This week I lay in the dark again, 35 years later, in the calm blue dusk of Joburg load-shedding, and listened to Serial. Do you know Serial? You should. It's a podcast online; in essence it's a radio show with a new episode once a week, to the fury of millennials who are used to having a whole series available immediately so they can stuff themselves like teenagers in a warehouse of porn and potato chips. Well, they think it's fury, but 5million of them listen each week, so really it's only the frustration of tots being rationed something for their own good. In time they'll remember with nostalgia the fine frustrations of waiting, the slow, finger-tapping drip of anticipation, the almost masochistic pleasures of submission to the medium.

Serial isn't a fictional series, it's an investigation by journalist Sarah Koenig into the 1999 murder of Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee and the subsequent conviction of her former high school boyfriend Adnan Syed. Each week millions of amateur criminologists huddle with their earphones or form listening groups and chat circles to debate the innocence of Adnan and his perfidious friend Jay. They obsess over clues and red herrings; they debate whether they're being misdirected; they anticipate the revelation of the truth. I suspect in a few weeks when the series ends there'll be broken hearts and wails of indignation when the truth isn't revealed. Truth can be revealed only in fiction, possibly because fiction is a machine designed around the misleading premise that there is an available truth.

With each episode our perceptions of Adnan or his nemesis Jay swing back and forth as we shift stories and perspectives. A detail becomes crucial, then unimportant, then just part of the swirling and indeterminate randomness and noise that crowds any search for a simple answer.

Real-life stories don't have satisfactory endings, not even in courtrooms, as we've all discovered at least twice this year, and this is what Serial exquisitely teases out. It's an investigation into the mechanics and seductions of stories: the stories we tell ourselves or let others tell us, the stories that convince us of fact or fiction, innocence or guilt. Even if there were confessions and eyewitnesses, we'll never know to the final degree everything that happened in Adnan Syed's car or Oscar Pistorius's bedroom or in either of their heads. A court of law or one of public opinion isn't a scientific laboratory of truth, it's a tangled Darwinian jungle where stories compete for dominance.

But the pleasures of Serial are deeper than this. My partner can always tell when I've been listening to it because for a while afterwards I start to speak with Sarah Koenig's cadences and inflections. There's something powerfully intimate about someone talking to you in the dark. There's intimacy in the fine changes of grain and texture in her voice, the human static, the sine waves of emotion, the pauses in which you can hear her breathe. You're connected to her. You're taking a long journey together.

Sarah Koenig is a self-questioning hero following an imaginary Ariadne's thread, bringing us with her as carefully as she can. I thrill to her hesitations, her bravery, her moments of despair and doubt. It is a powerful experience to lie listening in the dark, being entirely here and also there where she is and out in the world with all the other listeners. It feels like a gift to have a thoughtful, serious human voice telling me a story, trying her painful best to tell it well. It feels like love.