According to the theory of neurolinguistic programming, human beings differ in the way they receive ideas. Some build up mental castles (“I hear what you say”), others make pictures (“I see what you mean”).

I find this contrast a useful clue as to why some novels work much better as audiobooks than others. Two new releases, J. G. Farrell’s 1973 classic The Siege of Krishnapur (CSA Word, 4 CDs c 5hr, £15.99, offer £14.39) and Sebastian Faulks’s new novel Human Traces (Random House, 6 CDs, c 6hr, £16.99, offer £15.29) provide a case in point. Farrell draws us into India in the 1850s visually: the chapatis, “made with coarse flour and about the size of a biscuit” that are emissaries of mutiny but arouse less interest than an English newcomer’s modish lounging jacket; on a picnic, Louisa holds the thigh of a duck to be wolfed at by the moustachioed lips of Lieutenant Cutter; our two young heroes divert from cannonades against sepoys to scrape a swarm of black cockroaches away from the naked body of a hysterical young woman (“Is that meant to be there?” they ponder as they see female pubic hair for the first time). Such details add force to Farrell’s larger picture of the clash of civilisations behind the comic foreground of flirtations in the British cantonment. Tim Pigott-Smith offers a nicely contrasted reading, amused at the young Britons’ antics, clipped and urgent during the horrors of the siege.

Faulks’s exquisitely written novel is, by contrast, a mental castle. Two young men, one French, one English, meet in Deauville in 1876 and realise that they are intellectual soul mates, united in an interest in the causes of madness, but divided in the reasons for their curiosity. One marries the other’s sister and they run a sanatorium together. Their careers parallel contemporary theories of the mind (Darwin, Freud, the geneticists); their different natures are shown in the conclusions they come to and the women to whom they incline. We spend much time in the two men’s heads, which works fine for those who “hear what you say” but requires extra concentration for those who “see what you mean”.

Faulks’s conclusions about life and love lie elegantly as words on a page, but sound curt when heard, even when uttered with appropriate elegant aloofness by the reader Samuel West.

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